The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl in Around the World in 80 Books

Jun 22, 2008 Steve rated it really liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

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, 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? ...more

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Jul 24, 2009 Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance rated it really liked it

Shelves: post-apocalypse, poverty, history

Yes, I’ve heard stories about life during the Great Depression, but I’d not heard these kinds of stories. It is one thing to have no job and no money, but it is another to feel that nature has turned against you. I wasn’t familiar with the respiratory illnesses the dust caused and I wasn’t aware of the extent to which farms were devastated. The best book on this subject I’ve read.

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Oct 05, 2018 Martha rated it really liked it

Horrifying ecological disaster in an area of the country that never really recovered.

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Aug 13, 2015 Lisa of Hopewell rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2015, national-book-award, ala-notable-nonfiction, wa-book-award

If books like this were used in high school history classes more kids might take an interest in our history. What Ken Burns is to historical documentaries, Tim Egan is to historical nonfiction. A fast-paced book so readable I found myself still awake at 2 am enjoying every word. Best of all? I wasn’t even tired the next morning. That’s the test of a great book.The dust bowl–those images we all have of the woman with her baby or the man and his sons in the wind–was a man-made eco-catastrophe. But ...more

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Aug 24, 2009 Pam rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2009, non-fiction, history, american-history

From an historical perspective, I give this book a four. The story it tells needs to be told. In the end, I was left with quite a few questions unanswered so that was frustrating but overall, an eye-opening read. It makes me realize that the times WE call tough aren't really all that tough after all. ...more

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