The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

by Timothy Egan

book data

2,128 ratings, 4.03 average rating, 757 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		32%
4		43%
3		18%
2		4%
1		1%

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published

September 1st 2006 by Mariner Books

binding

Paperback, 340 pages

literary awards

National Book Award for Nonfiction (2006)

isbn

0618773479 (isbn13: 9780618773473)

description

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan's cri...more

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04/10/08

Nina rated it:

Read in April, 2008

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

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05/29/08

Maggie rated it:

Read in June, 2008

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

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03/09/09

Sasha rated it:

bookshelves: non-fiction

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

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11/13/08

Diana Higgins rated it:

bookshelves: abandoned

Read in November, 2008

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

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12/05/08

Margaret rated it:

bookshelves: borders-original-voices, non-fiction

Read in December, 2008

recommends it for: anyone who believes reading & knowing history is important!

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 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 compliment. "The Worst Hard Time" was the 2006 National Book Award non-fiction winner AND Borders "Original Voices" non-fiction winner, and I see why. It's compelling reading from start to finish. My only quibble is that I could have used even more so-called boring detail about the environmental and historical issues and facts, but this is truly a minor quibble. Mr. Egan relies heavily on individual human stories, which personalizes the Dust Bowl events, and relayed a lot of new information to me about just how bad the Dust Bowl was, but sometimes it's a little overly much, especially when you want to reach into the book and slap some of these people, screaming "You idiot!"

While I admit that what spurred me to pick this book up now is the current economic situation, and while others have said to me that the book demonstrates how "history repeats itself" with respect to current economic news, my big take-a-way from this book was that the Dust Bowl really was a human instigated ECOLOGICAL crisis simply compounded by a national economic depression and the bank failures. It is disheartening to read that the land on the whole has never fully recovered (parts of the midwest plains remain sterile) and that the Ogallala aquifer underneath the entire middle north-south belt of the U.S. is being drained at such a rapid rate (irrigating about 30% of U.S. farmland) to water farmland on the plains that the aquifer will likely be depleted within 100 years. HELLO! Yet another piece of news on a long list that makes me wonder about the future of the human race.

The book is well paced and structurally sound. It relates the history of the Great Plains (although, again, there could have been more -a minor nit), the great plow-up in the first part of the 20th Century and through the '20s, and then the Dust Bowl itself. Why anyone stayed, and a remarkable number of people did, is beyond me given the descriptions of human suffering.

For those who like this book, I highly recommend Tony Horwitz's recent "A Voyage Long and Strange," which includes wonderful descriptions of the Great Plains and the plains grass in the chapter on the Spanish conquistadors who traveled north from Central America into the plains in their search for gold and other plunder. Mr. Horwitz cites and quotes from many original sources about those expeditions, and the descriptions of being lost in endless flat land with only the perpetual wind and waving grass (some conquistadors went mad) are creepy. It's not someplace where I would have wanted to have been lost, but it's depressing as Hell to know that virtually every single bit of it was ripped up and plowed under, and 70+ years later hasn't recovered.(less)

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02/15/09

Melinda rated it:

Read in May, 2008

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

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03/22/09

Kay rated it:

bookshelves: read-in-2009

Read in March, 2009

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

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04/14/08

Folkens rated it:

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: every one

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.

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11/29/08

Wendell rated it:

Read in September, 2007

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 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 to say -- which I suspect is connected to my sense that he relied too much on too few sources (including a diary that he overuses) -- and his slightly jerky style gets distracting (he's not a great one for writing transitions). For me, one failing is that Egan never explains, in any specific way, the origin and cause of the "black dusters" and other freakish weather phenomena of the "Dust Bowl" era. He tells us that the dust storms came because the topsoil had been carved off by overfarming (and then aggravated by the abandonment of unsuccessful farms), but a meteorological or ecological explanation - even a nontechnical one - wouldn't have been a bad idea. His description of the CCC efforts at re-grassing the plains left me with significant questions that he doesn't answer: Given that the dust storms continued unabated throughout the effort, what was the government's strategy for protecting the newly planted grass during the time it would have taken for it to mature enough to hold the soil? And how did they water it? In addition, I'd have appreciated a more substantive "bring us up to date" chapter at the end that explained more clearly what happened in the wake of the human and policy failures of the Dust Bowl. Nor would a little class analysis have hurt -- other than wagging a kind of general finger at get-rich schemes perpetrated both by private interests and by the government, he seems careful not to accuse anybody too directly of creating an ecological disaster, of maiming (psychologically and literally) and killing tens of thousands of people, or of engaging in a kind of class warfare that embodied the ferocious social Darwinism of Depression-era capitalism. Finally, I'd just point out that the book isn't really the story of "survivors" of the Dust Bowl; there are essentially no survivors, and this is no movie-of-the-week tale of grit, courage, and heroism that win out in the end. The people Egan follows are bleak and broken, and their desperation is palpable. *Worst Hard Time* begs the question: Is there any redemption? I think Egan knows there was none, but he seems loathe to say it in so many words. (less)

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10/14/08

Bob added 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 "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 have been like when nature punished farmers for turning millions of acres of grassland into billowing towers of dust, dirt and sand.

Imagine how hard times must have been that people in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and southwestern Colorado would be driven to eat pickled tumbleweed to survive.

Imagine going three years without a paycheck.

Imagine your small town newspaper editor describing as "sissies" those who -- after losing all the top soil from their land, not having anything to feed their cattle, watching their children, spouses and relatives die from "dust pneumonia" -- didn't have the "courage" to stick out the hard times.

Through interviews with people who lived through the 1930s in the Dust Bowl counties and terrific research, including amazing diary entries from a farmer who lost everything, Egan helps his readers know this little-known era of American history.

It's a dense work, filled with information, especially information about real people - how they felt, how they cried, how they survived.

It's an honest history, too, one not afraid to acknowledge both the failed recovery programs of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and the conservation-minded ones that began to work to revive the land in places.

Whether or not you believe that the planet faces climate change today, this is a book that should help everyone understand how connected humanity is to the soil. The consequences of not valuing the soil result in tragedies like the Dust Bowl -- something no one who reads this book would ever want to go through. -- bz (less)

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08/21/08

April rated it:

recommends it for: Anyone who thinks they got it bad

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 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 in the grasslands were pure profit. But as usual, people got greedy, had no foresight and farmed wheat and re-farmed wheat then farmed some more wheat until the buffalo grass that held the soil in place disappeared completely and the soil was reduced to sand.
Then the stock market crashed and wheat prices dropped to nothing. The high plains people were left with worthless wheat and a depleted land. At the same point in time, when the depression was in full effect, a drought took hold of the high plains. The drought conditions combined with high winds (that wouldve normally been broken by trees or tall grasses, now gone) caused dusters that terrorized the locals. People living in dugouts had no chance, and people who had actually build clapboard shacks didn't have much more chance, as the sand blew through the cracks effortlessly. People died of dust pneumonia, wherein the sand filled their lungs until they suffocated. Cows and horses ingested so much dust that an autopsy revealed an animal's stomach that was so packed with dust that no more food, if there were any, could have gotten in. People lost their minds, living in a barren, desert landscape that blew dunes over their shacks, cars and farm equipment. One vivid image details a woman who is happened upon by a traveler who begs them to tell her about the outside world-another woman wanders the sand-blown roads dragging a toddler with no direction or purpose left to live for. The static electricity in the air was such that people dragged chains behind their cars to reduce the risk of being electrocuted. Similarly, people would shock one another just by touching an elbow or brushing against each other on accident.(less)

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06/22/08

Steve rated it:

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in June, 2008

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 ...more 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 choice, but not all. Still, it was the Depression, and finding something else was difficult. In one particularly sad story, a farmer and his wife are forced to separate, as she gets a job in Denver as a maid, while he is unable to find anything. He has to stay on his dying farm. His journal entries are as stark as Dylan’s The Ballad of Hollis Brown.

Like Barry’s book, Egan lays out the reasons for the Dust Bowl, a perfect storm of bad government policy, historical events, and nature. Where the book excels is in its various character sketches. There is a young woman, and unpaid teacher, trying to have a baby in a suffocating (literally) environment, a blowhard newspaper editor that Egan likens to Orson Welles, an old cowboy and his family, and, my favorite, a real American Original, Tex Thornton, a professional rainmaker who uses TNT rockets, balloons, and nitroglycerin to open the skies.

You will find yourself admiring most of these people, but if there’s a real hero and prophet, it’s Hugh Bennett, who was the first Chief of the Soil Conservation Service. Bennett warned early on, that the Department of Agriculture was misleading people with its policies of encouraging the plowing up of the fragile Great Plains. The result, after the wheat market crashed and drought set in: Dust. And on a biblical scale. Some of these sky blackening storms would reach New York and Washington, D.C. Bennett would, under Roosevelt, go on to run Operation Dust Bowl. He would have some success reestablishing the grasslands. Slowly, some hope would return to the area, but as Egan closes the book, the seeds of a future folly are still present. As a thread through the book, mention is made again and again of the Ogallala Aquifier, of how this aquifier, which underlies an area stretching from South Dakota to Texas, once fully tapped into, will somehow make the land productive. This is a similar scenario of trying to force the land to do something it cannot do on its own. Well, the aquifier was indeed tapped into. The land is productive. But there are reports today that this aquifier is now being rapidly drained away. What will be the consequences this time? (less)

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12/11/07

Malcolm Logan rated it:

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: American history buffs; those concerned about climate change

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

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10/15/07

Omar rated it:

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan is a dramatic story with an insightful look into the history of the United States. Set mostly in the towns of Boise City, Oklahoma; Dalhart, Texas; and Bacca County – the book recounts the story of the rise and fall of the settlers of “No-Man's-Land,” in the Southern Plains of the American west during the 1930s.

The Worst Hard Time begins discussing the mass immigration into the Southern Plains during the turn of the century. Enticed by prom...more The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan is a dramatic story with an insightful look into the history of the United States. Set mostly in the towns of Boise City, Oklahoma; Dalhart, Texas; and Bacca County – the book recounts the story of the rise and fall of the settlers of “No-Man's-Land,” in the Southern Plains of the American west during the 1930s.

The Worst Hard Time begins discussing the mass immigration into the Southern Plains during the turn of the century. Enticed by promises of economic prosperity and unimaginable opportunities of agricultural success, great numbers of people flocked to “No-Man's-Land.” The business scene during the Great War was bustling. Uncle Dick Coon, a business-man in Dalhart is portrayed by Egan as frequently flashing his C-note boasting that he had no fear of poverty. The atmosphere was one of great hubris, arrogance, and pride – and it is because of this great sin that the dust bowls emerge.

Over plowing and over farming the land had led to the greatest surplus of food that the nation had ever seen in its history. However, as the Great Depression began and progressed, farmers found an inability to profit as it was impossible to sell their surpluses. Farmers lobbied President Herbert Hoover for the government to purchase the excess food and feed the hungry, but he stubbornly refused. Farmers were left with no recourse but destroying their crops and going into bankruptcy.

The over plowing of the land followed by its total lack in cultivation led in the absolute destruction of the soil. It was due to this that the great dust storms emerged. The dust storms with their accompaniment by extremely high temperatures and drought created a health crisis in the populace.

Egan's tale is an extremely important lesson on how man-made changes in the environment can lead to harsh conditions in the lives of human beings. The great crisis of the dust bowls was caused almost entirely by human hands. This lesson is an extremely important one in the modern world, whereby our actions as a human species can possibly lead to another environmental crisis even worse than the dust bowls – such as global warming, or even nuclear winter.

Egan's description of the climax of the Dust Bowl is captivating and startling. I found myself shocked when reading about trains being stopped multiple times due to many riders choking on dust. The double funeral of Hazel Lucas' grandmother and daughter in the same day truly brought realization of the sadness felt in such a dire situation.

In the conclusion of the book, we are given the implications that this great crisis had on public policy. President Roosevelt, after being advised by the report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee, subscribed to the position that the Dust Bowls were the product of human intervention into the ecosystem of the Southern plains. Roosevelt's hard work resulted in a new policy of preserving the soil in the Southern plains through planting crops and agricultural engineering which finally saved the Southern plains.

I believe that the essence of Egan's book is a strong lesson in the necessity of human beings to act in ways which will avoid environmental disaster before it happens, while also acting to stop it after it happens. The lesson of The Worst Hard Time is that public policy must actively work for the conservation of the environment. Ignoring the environment, our government will only act at its own peril due to the immense interdependence of environment on the economic, social, and health situation of the nation. Egan wonderfully, in his chilling descriptions of what was “the worst hard time,” instills a fear in his reader of the great dangers which lurk if we do not learn this lesson from history; a fear which will hopefully be an impetus for citizens of the United States, and in fact the world, to actively work to avert environmental catastrophe.(less)

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05/29/07

Sammy rated it:

bookshelves: the-best

Read in May, 2007

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

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03/12/09

noisy penguin rated it:

Read in March, 2009

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

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04/04/09

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.

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02/01/09

Nydia rated it:

Read in May, 2007

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.

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11/27/07

Emily rated it:

Read in November, 2007

recommends it for: people interested in the Great Depression, American History, and the environment

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

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