"Bone of the Bone" | Reviewed by William Winkler

Journalist Sarah Smarsh is not bashful about sharing the details of her earliest years. She was born to an unwed 17-year-old mother with whom she had a turbulent relationship in her youth. She moved into her grandmother’s home, a 5th-generation subsistence farm, as a pre-adolescent. In her childhood she moved frequently, attending multiple elementary schools.

It is this background in dirt-poor rural Kansas that honed her appreciation for the stubborn survival skills her lower-class peers were forced to adopt. It is these skills, and the people who utilize them, that serves as the point upon which her most recent book, “Bone of the Bone,” turns.

A collection of essays and longer pieces, published between 2014 and 2024, “Bone of the Bone” chronicles the resilience of this class of Smarsh’s family and peers. It peels away the stereotypical picture of these people as dull, lazy and unimaginative.

In Highway Construction May Unearth Human Remains, Smarsh tells the story of a proposed bypass around the college town of Lawrence, Kansas. The bypass would encroach on land sacred to the Native American population of the area as well as on a pristine wetland, home to rare or endangered flora and fauna. Despite the protests of those most directly impacted by its construction, the highway was constructed.

Poor Teeth “reveals the psychological hell of having poor teeth in a rich, capitalistic country.” The poor are shamed for their dental conditions despite the fact that for the vast majority adequate dental care is neither affordable or available.

She decries the clumsy misuse of the term “populism,” pointing out that “[it] is not an ideology directed left or right; it’s a rage pointed upward, toward those in power.”

Smarsh describes her development as an author by saying, “This former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry [writing and publishing] much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a Whiteness-privileged one.”

“Bone of the Bone” will give the thoughtful reader new insights into the burdens of the working class, presented by a skilled author who has lived those burdens.

Buy the Book.