Heart Earth Synopsis

With its piercing look backward to a family and its fate, Heart Earth is the companion to Ivan Doig's earlier classic memoir, This House of Sky. Against the backdrop of World War Two and the American land before and since, the saga of the Doigs and their journey from a defense housing project in boomtime Arizona to the high country of their Montana origins builds with the drama only real life can hold. Here we see:

• an adventurous mother miraculously back again in the evocative lines of her wartime letters after "all else of her...had been only farthest childscapes, half-rememberings thinned by so many years since."
• a resonant father who gives off the "tense hum of a wire in the wind" as he strives, in memorably go-getting fashion, to make his family secure against chronic odds;
• and a child, "touchy and thorough, doctrinaire and dreamy," who early learns to infiltrate the drama-filled world of grown-ups by "standing back and prowling with the ears."