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Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression

By Mildred Armstrong Kalish

Bantam, 292 pages, $12 paper

I do have the spring sniffles, and perhaps that’s why the prescription here — the ordinarily unappealing idea of “a flannel packet of hot, fried yellow onions and goose grease placed on the chest” — seems tempting, but I do think it’s because Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s clean prose, loving but unsentimental, about those days radiates about a world before cell phones — before the simple life became chic.