Heart of the Country Author:Greg Matthews A half-white child is born to a dying Indian woman alone on the Kansas prairie in 1855. Adopted by a Saint Louis doctor, he grows up intelligent, willful, and perhaps cursed. He runs away at 16 and careens through several jobs and much money until trapped as a nursemaid to another precocious brat in a small Kansas town. Hunchbacked, distant, and... more » of alien stock, Joe Cobden lives an unheroic life, but the small insanities he takes part in or meets in that small town are the meat of this tremendous novel. Matthews has taken a dust-blown soap opera and turned it into a character study of warped minds and withered souls, of human nature distilled to essences by isolation. The various people can be as grotesque in their actions as Cobden is in his physique, but nothing seems contrived here. A very compelling book. -- Library Journal« less