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Jul 04, 2011

Stephen rated it:

3.0 stars. A good book...a thorough history...but dry as a throat in the middle of the Sahara Desert. That about sums it up, but I will, of course, continue to babble for a few more paragraphs.

Before I read this book, I knew next to nothing about the Dust Bowl and the cataclysmic storms that occurred in the 1930‘s primarily in the area of the U.S. known as the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma (see map):

If you're like me in this respect, than this book is a v More...

4 comments like (30 people liked it)

Aug 03, 2011

Nina rated it:

5 stars to a book about the Dust Bowl - who would've thought it? Egan does an amazing job of combining the varied causes, and the related perspectives, of the drouth that savaged the plains throughout the 1930s. Not only was it an amazing read, made personal through the stories of a handful of families in the Texas / Oklahoma panhandle, I learned about one of the most influential and far-reaching incidents in our country's history. And the parallels to the environmental, governmental, political, More...

1 comment like (12 people liked it)

Feb 07, 2010

Jason rated it:

When you read The Worst Hard Time please have copious amounts of cool water or lemonade at your side. This true, brutal story of the Dust Bowl will have you reaching for--and appreciating--water like no other story you've ever read. In fact, like me, you may even stand in the next rain shower looking skyward, face slathered in wetness, bending your mind to understand the environmental apocalypse that struck our heartland 3 generations ago.

Timothy Egan's book is an example of why I More...

2 comments like (14 people liked it)

Jun 26, 2011

Jeanette rated it:

Exhausting
Sobering
Depressing
Instructive
Haunting
Interesting
Timely
Grinding
Surprising
Painful
Important

Now, what's up with the subtitle? If it were really "The Untold Story," wouldn't it just be a book full of blank pages? Shouldn't it be "The Previously Untold Story"? And why don't publishers ever ask me for my opinions on these things? This calls for some serious pouting.
You should still read the book though. O More...

4 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jun 03, 2008

Maggie rated it:

This should be required reading for anyone living in the west and for all politicians. The author does a fine job of telling the story of the Dust Bowl era, why it happened (natural forces and human actions), and where we stand today. It's clear to see that adding climate change to the mix requires us to develop stronger conservation policies & practices if we want to avoid such a catastrophe happening again. With the population we have in this area now, I can't imagine the suffering or how we w More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Mar 09, 2009

Sasha rated it:

Once upon a time there was a country where speculation ran rampant, environmental disaster loomed, and foreclosures and job loss dominated the economy. It was the Great Depression, v1.0.

Timothy Egan's book has an unusual perspective. It is about those who *stayed* in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle during the dust bowl. It is the story of government supported land speculation gone horribly wrong. The farmers uprooted a fragile grass ecology and destroyed 1000s of years of topsoil More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 15, 2008

Diana rated it:

I have about a week to read this for book club and I've got a lot of books in progress that I hate to set aside, so we'll see how this goes...

UPDATE: I gave up! I must be the only person on the planet who didn't like this book. I found the writing to be overblown, over-the-top, even silly at times.

The way it was organized didn't work for me. He'd introduce a person or family and I'd start to get interested, and then he'd abandon them and go back to large, sweeping pa More...

7 comments like (10 people liked it)

Dec 05, 2008

Margaret rated it:

I love reading history books for the reasonably intelligent masses; you know, the type that's written as a story, with accessible writing, and without a lot of tedious footnotes. Journalists are often good at writing these types of history (and other) books since they're trained to TELL A STORY that doesn't skip details, but which keeps the reader engaged.

Although it doesn't appear from the jacket that Mr. Egan is a journalist, he writes this history book like one, and that's a real More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 15, 2009

Melinda rated it:

This non-fiction view of the Great Depression from a very human standpoint was one of the most moving books I've read in a long time. The author interviewed survivors of the Dust Bowl, put their stories together from the heady speculative times of the 20s through the crash of the wheat market and a long painful drought, which coincided with (and helped cause) the Great Depression. I don't think I could have tolerated the suffering that these people went through, but they stayed because they h More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 27, 2009

Kay rated it:

What a sad tale . . . Timothy Egan outlines what led to the great dust storms on the high plains in the 1930's. Many times I thought of a verse my grandfather passed down from his father who had lived in Nebraska during those times:

"Nebraska land, Nebraska land
'Tis on thy barren soil we stand.
It's not as though we wish to stay -
We are too poor to move away."

The author certainly brought those words to a stark reality in my mind. And I don't be More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 14, 2008

Folkens rated it:

Sometimes we think we are having a hard time. Those folks had worse than hard times. I'm grateful I didn't have to live through that time. My parents left that country and came to western Washington because of those conditions.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 19, 2010

Shelley rated it:

I received a cursory education on the "Dust Bowl" days in high school history class, listened to the folk songs of Woody Guthrie, Nanci Griffith, etc. and watched the Grapes of Wrath. I had no idea how utterly devastating this decade was! This book stunned me and brought me to tears on many occasions. Timothy Egan was able to brilliantly capture in words what you'd think would be indescribable. I was able to connect to the reality in my imagination and feel the desperation in the lives More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 02, 2011

Will rated it:

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is far from public consciousness today, and that is a shame. There are lessons to be gleaned from that experience that apply directly to challenges of the 21st century. If we are not to be doomed to repeat the mistakes that were made before, it is critical that we know what happened then, how it came to be, and what might be done to prevent it, or things like it, from happening again.

How to explain a place where hollow-bellied horses chewed on fence posts , wher

More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Aug 30, 2010

Chrissie rated it:

Pstscript: My husband is now reading this book and so of course we are talking about it. Well, I have discovered at least two errors, and this gets me worried. What other facts have I absorbed as true and perhaps are false? I am left with an unpleasant feeling. Error number one is on page 26-27. There it says that Native Americans were not American citizens in 1926. I wanted to know when they were allowed to become American citizens. What did I find? They were given citizenship in 1924. What? S More...

8 comments like (7 people liked it)

Nov 29, 2008

Wendell rated it:

Egan's *Worst Hard Time* is intriguing and largely well done, if a bit relentless. Granted, he's writing about a phenomenon that dragged on for years, repeatedly raising and dashing ever-slimmer hopes; the people who lived the "Dust Bowl" years were literally worn out, but Egan needed to do something more with the material than recreate that sensation. Toward the last third of the book, in particular, a kind of sameness creeps into the narrative, as if Egan didn't really know what else More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Oct 25, 2011

Bob rated it:

"The Worst Hard Time,"
by Timothy Egan

You may have seen photos of the Dust Bowl, but read Timothy Egan's comprehensive history and you can taste the dirt and feel the wind blast against your skin.

Egan's "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl," paints such a vivid portrait of those 1930s years of dry, violent storms that you'll find yourself coughing and swallowing hard just imagining what it must More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 21, 2008

April rated it:

So you think you've got it bad because your sink leaks and your boyfriend snores. Guess again. At least you've got a sink. The people that endured the dirty thirties were slowly worn down by a combination of factors that ocurred in a chain reaction: At one point in the 1920's the high plains were lush grasslands which were exploited by ranchers and hungry cattle and then by wheat farmers, both local and the 'suitcase' variety who came only to profit and when times got tough, evacuated. The 20's More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 22, 2008

Steve rated it:

Timothy Egan won the National Book Award for The Worst Hard Time. While it serves as a good “disaster” companion to John Barry’s magnificent Rising Tide, I found Egan’s effort a bit dryer. That’s probably due to the subject: Dust, Dust, Dust. You breathe it, you eat it, you sleep with it, and you read it. It’s everywhere. Well, it’s more than that, but by book’s end, you are just in awe of the fact that those who lived in (and through) the Dust Bowl, would of stayed. Many of them had no choi More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 13, 2007

Malcolm David rated it:

Here's a thought-provoking book about a rarely examined moment in American history that tells a story of fortitude and strength, reveals the innocent naivete that is often the seed bed of disaster, and sheds light on the precariousness of our tenancy of this planet. The homesteaders who tore up the buffalo grass to plant wheat were well-meaning and industrious; they had no idea that they were creating conditions that would destroy their world. The fact that profiteers (as usual) escalated the More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 03, 2009

Lauri rated it:

I became fascinated with the Dust Bowl when I first started watching the HBO series "Carnivale". At the time, all I was able to dig up on the topic was one, small Scholastic book at the library, but it left me yearning for more. This book is the first in-depth chronicle that I've come across, and I enjoyed it, thoroughly. It tells the story of how it all started: the free & cheap land grab offers (land stolen from the Indians, of course) for farmers to come and make a go of it in a pa More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jun 12, 2007

Sammy rated it:

The most amazing thing about this book was that it read like a story. A lot of non-fiction books recapping moments in history tend to read like school books. Every once and a while highlighting a story then listing dry facts. Timothy Egan did not do that. Every word, while informative, is rich and enticing, keeping you hooked.

Another thing Egan did really well was keeping thing easy to understand. There were a few moments where I was a little lost, but for the most part everythi More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Mar 29, 2009

noisy penguin rated it:

It usually takes me a lot longer to read non-fiction than fiction, but I burned through The Worst Hard Time in four days. I couldn't put it down. Egan weaves the stories of families that survived the Dust Bowl with images, statistics, and history of the mid-west to create a compelling, well-written narrative. The descriptions of the dusters, the land, and the people were beautiful and haunting; detailed enough to paint a clear picture of the horrors of the 30s, but with enough brevity that the p More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 04, 2009

Kim rated it:

I read this eye-opening book about the Great Depression almost two years ago. I remember being struck by how quickly a prospering economy deteriorated into "The Worst Hard Time". I had the strongest feeling that our country was poised for a similar collapse and that it wouldn't take much to trigger it. Well . . . here we are and if you read this book you will probably feel like I do, that we haven't hit bottom yet. A very sobering story.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 08, 2009

Colleen rated it:

This really is can't-put-it-down history. Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of the Dust Bowl was limited to The Grapes of Wrath and a paragraph or two in a high school history textbook. Unlike The Grapes of Wrath, this book is focused on life for those people who didn't leave. It's a tragic chapter of American history conveyed through stories of several families interwoven with facts and observations such as the following: "The flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least arable part More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Feb 01, 2009

Nydia rated it:

The stories of the "dust bowl" era were compelling. They seemed like the truist stories of this time I had ever read. I liked the way they were presented in stages and repeated again from the persons point of view at a different time.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Nov 27, 2007

Emily rated it:

I first heard about this book from an interview the author, Timothy Egan, did with NPR's Fresh Air. I realized that I didn't know much about this part of American History and wanted to learn more. As soon as I started reading the book, I couldn't put it down. The book truly reads as a story and is not boring at all. I found it shocking how quickly people's actions can have a negative effect on the enovironment. It was reassuring to know that these effects can be somewhat reversed, but dishe More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 26, 2009

Heather rated it:

Fascinating book about a time and an area I know little about.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Aug 06, 2011

Amanda added it

I'm amazed at how little I knew about the Dust Bowl before reading this book. I just read The Big Burn (also by Timothy Egan) out loud with Scott and I was totally impressed by Egan's sensitive -- almost poetic -- use of language and metaphor. I didn't previously have any great interest in the national forest service or forest fires, but the writing of the book made it interesting. The Worst Hard Time, Egan's more popular, award-winning book, was even more enjoyable for me. The language was More...

0 comments like

Aug 03, 2011

Bill added it

The story of the dust bowl, bar none, the worst man-made environmental disaster in history, needs to stand as a reminder of the folly in thinking we can do what we please with natural landscapes. The hydrocarbon has given us the very temporary ability to out-muscle Mother Nature, and we have evolved our machinery to the point where it's an afternoon's work to yank a mountain out of its valley for a passel of coal - the barter of a few million years of geological handiwork for a few months of ele More...

0 comments like

Apr 20, 2010

Joyce rated it:

Winner of the National Book Award for 2006, The Worst Hard Time is a gripping, masterful account of the greatest human-made ecological disaster the US and possibly the world has ever known. It is a page-turning, horrifying account of the consequences of ignorance and greed, and the havoc that human beings can wreak on a land. It is also the grim account of the catastrophic consequences of such havoc, of the horrific way the land can strike back.[return][return]If the language seems extreme, it More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

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