Timothy Egan recounts the environmental, financial, and humanitarian catastrophe that was the Great American Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
My thoughts
I've read The Grapes of Wrath and learned about how the farming crisis contributed to the Great Depression, but I knew shamefully little about the Dust Bowl until I read this book. The best way to teach history is to make it personal, and Egan focuses on different communities throughout the Oklahoma/Texas/Colorado region to make this devastating story come to life. The storytelling drags at times, but Egan succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the people who stubbornly rode out the Dust Bowl despite unimaginable horrors—walls of dirt that hurtled across the Great Plains and destroyed settlers' lives and livelihoods. He does a great job conveying their despair as months turn to years without any end in sight.
Egan does a masterful job with the personal element of the story, but he also does a good job explaining the technical facets of the Dust Bowl, specifically its causes and its economic and environmental consequences. This book is as much a narrative of a tragedy as it is a cautionary tale. The Dust Bowl was wholly man-made. There were smart people who saw the folly of ripping up thousands of acres of land and trying to force it to produce healthy crops, yet the government persisted in its efforts to encourage people to settle and farm this last untamed portion of the country. Once the Dust Bowl began, the government's inaction was appalling and the rest of the country's response ranged from disinterest to downright hostility.
One small complaint: There are photos to supplement the author's story, but it drove me crazy that Egan repeatedly described other photos that don't appear anywhere in the book.
Bottom line
This a wrenching and insightful read about a chapter of history that far too many Americans know far too little about. I picked up a copy of Egan's next book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, and I hope that will be similarly enlightening.
Fine print
The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan
Genre: history, non-fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library
I'll have to add this one to my list. And thanks for the advance warning about the pictures - I can't remember what book I read recently where pictures were described and not shown, but it really is one of my pet peeves!
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