Sarah Smarsh, reporter and essayist, presents “Heartland,” her eye-opening and eloquent memoir about working-class poverty in the American Midwest, in conversation with Boston-based Linda K. Wertheimer, author of “Faith Ed, Teaching About Religion In An Age Of Intolerance.” Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.