sheritolley's review against another edition
3.0
This book was not a page turner, but well worth the time. What these people went through? Oh my gosh! All I can say is it made me thankful. The wind might blow for ten days straight here in Twin Falls, but it's not dropping tons of dirt. People are not dying of dust peumonia, or living off of pickled tumbleweed. Our country might be going through a hard time right now, but what those people in the Dust Bowl suffered was horrible, and I hope it is never repeated.
lpip's review against another edition
2.0
So fascinating for the first few chapters, and then just repetitive for the next 200 pages. Kept thinking something new would happen, but it never did. Definitely sparked my interest in the dust bowl though!
ela_lee_'s review against another edition
3.0
“100 million acres had lost most of its topsoil, nearly half had been essentially destroyed and could not be farmed again. Thinks about the size - an area stretching 500 miles north to south and 300 miles east to west was drifting and dusted. Two thirds of the total area of the Great Plains had been damaged by severe wind erosion...an environmental disaster bigger than anything in American history.”
3.5 stars rounded down to 3, mainly because I found the book pretty repetitive, a bit too long, and don’t feel like I learned much more information after the second half. However, I’m still glad to have read this book; I found it intensely interesting and descriptive of an area and time period that is often overlooked.
The Dust Bowl era has always intrigued me and I had no idea just how much the government was involved with colonizing and destroying this area (shocker.) The government literally lied and convinced people to move here to start a new, enriched life when the towns hadn't even broken ground yet. People were ordered to murder millions of buffalo and rabbits because they thought these animals were destroying/taking up their farm land, they pulled up tons of grasslands in order to force their agricultural habits on an area that doesn’t naturally grow their crops. The Dust Bowl was a completely man-made disaster caused by Americans choosing not to educate themselves and listen to environmental/agricultural experts of the time. We destroyed the land and soil and wouldn’t listen to nature: The answer was there in the land but we ignored it.
3.5 stars rounded down to 3, mainly because I found the book pretty repetitive, a bit too long, and don’t feel like I learned much more information after the second half. However, I’m still glad to have read this book; I found it intensely interesting and descriptive of an area and time period that is often overlooked.
The Dust Bowl era has always intrigued me and I had no idea just how much the government was involved with colonizing and destroying this area (shocker.) The government literally lied and convinced people to move here to start a new, enriched life when the towns hadn't even broken ground yet. People were ordered to murder millions of buffalo and rabbits because they thought these animals were destroying/taking up their farm land, they pulled up tons of grasslands in order to force their agricultural habits on an area that doesn’t naturally grow their crops. The Dust Bowl was a completely man-made disaster caused by Americans choosing not to educate themselves and listen to environmental/agricultural experts of the time. We destroyed the land and soil and wouldn’t listen to nature: The answer was there in the land but we ignored it.
sueking365's review against another edition
informative
medium-paced
4.0
Audio. Informative non-fiction book about the Dust Bowl, a period of American history which I know little about. Told through the stories of various real people who settled the plains and tried to make a go of life there, despite hardships, weather, and land practices that pretty much destroyed the soil.
statman's review against another edition
3.0
I really didn't know much about the dust bowl and this was a great coverage of the topic, often told through the eyes of those who lived through it. Quite the tragedy that could have been prevented and that has lessons for us in our day.
cdlindwall's review against another edition
4.0
Every person who doesn't believe in the importance of environmentalism should read this book — every person who think humans don't have the ability to shift the natural balance of the ecosystem and set off a cataclysmic chain of events. The Dirty 30s was America's worst natural disaster, and it was man-made. Fool-hardy farmers didn't know any better and likely wouldn't have believed warnings if they'd heard them. They stripped the land, then left it, and let it blow. It took only a few decades to destroy an ecosystem that had taken tens of thousands of years to perfect. Like that, gone.
We forget that nature doesn't care about our Manifest Destiny — America's right to plow and farm and reap and conquer everywhere we possibly can. Across the West and through the golden grass of the Midwest. Nature is bigger than our plans. It certainly is indifferent to our plans.
Egan does a wonderful job explaining to an East Coast, 21st-century reader how the catastrophe happened. He also vividly describes what it's like to live in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and be literally choking and dying on the swirling, ubiquitous dust in your air. It's something that's hard to grasp for most of us. In fact, few even know what caused America's worst natural disaster in the "Dirty 30s." Some don't even know it happened.
So for that, Egan won me over. Creative non-fiction is my favorite — taking an historical event and presenting it to me with beautiful narratives and prose. He does that well. I do think it got a bit repetitive in the second half. I wish Egan had taken the last third of the book and told more about how the "Dust Bowl" did eventually become a habitable place — the transition from the 30s to now.
I was impressed, though, with the number of creative ways Egan described the dust. I'll share a few:
"...layers of dust, one wave after the other, an aerial assault..."
"...this anemic, fly-away ground..."
"...these blowing prairie states..."
"...the nation's midsection became a sandbox."
"...the dreary routine of life in a dusty fog."
"...a fall without color, just as it had been a spring and summer of grey."
"...the galloping flatlands..."
"...the black funnel dancing..."
"...the moving mountain of dirt..."
"...the blackness..."
He's a great writer and an even better reporter. This book works beautifully as an historical recounting of an epically hard time in American life. But it also serves wonderfully as a modern warning about the balance of nature and the risk we take when disturbing it. If you aren't familiar with this time period, this book is a great introduction. I also recommend viewing the photographs/watching the documentary mentioned in Egan's book, as they will help bring to life some of the scenes he describes.
We forget that nature doesn't care about our Manifest Destiny — America's right to plow and farm and reap and conquer everywhere we possibly can. Across the West and through the golden grass of the Midwest. Nature is bigger than our plans. It certainly is indifferent to our plans.
Egan does a wonderful job explaining to an East Coast, 21st-century reader how the catastrophe happened. He also vividly describes what it's like to live in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and be literally choking and dying on the swirling, ubiquitous dust in your air. It's something that's hard to grasp for most of us. In fact, few even know what caused America's worst natural disaster in the "Dirty 30s." Some don't even know it happened.
So for that, Egan won me over. Creative non-fiction is my favorite — taking an historical event and presenting it to me with beautiful narratives and prose. He does that well. I do think it got a bit repetitive in the second half. I wish Egan had taken the last third of the book and told more about how the "Dust Bowl" did eventually become a habitable place — the transition from the 30s to now.
I was impressed, though, with the number of creative ways Egan described the dust. I'll share a few:
"...layers of dust, one wave after the other, an aerial assault..."
"...this anemic, fly-away ground..."
"...these blowing prairie states..."
"...the nation's midsection became a sandbox."
"...the dreary routine of life in a dusty fog."
"...a fall without color, just as it had been a spring and summer of grey."
"...the galloping flatlands..."
"...the black funnel dancing..."
"...the moving mountain of dirt..."
"...the blackness..."
He's a great writer and an even better reporter. This book works beautifully as an historical recounting of an epically hard time in American life. But it also serves wonderfully as a modern warning about the balance of nature and the risk we take when disturbing it. If you aren't familiar with this time period, this book is a great introduction. I also recommend viewing the photographs/watching the documentary mentioned in Egan's book, as they will help bring to life some of the scenes he describes.
sarah_dietrich's review against another edition
3.0
The Worst Hard Time is a historical account of a number of different people living in the American dust bowl during the 1930's. It also catalogues the political response to the drought and how this affected the people. At first glance the title sounds like hyperbole, but its not. The people who stayed in the dustbowl through the 30's surely lived through the worst hard time of their lives. However, I don't think that Egan's writing did justice to the plight of these people - I found that the various stories blended together, because Egan didn't give a unique voice to each individual. Having said that, I thought that the epilogue did a great job of pulling the stories together while highlighting the different experience of each person. I would recommend The Worst Hard Time to anyone who is interested in a historical account of the dustbowl.
bookishwendy's review against another edition
3.0
I appreciated this as someone who has lived in Texas, Nebraska and Colorado, and who used to stop in Dalhart, TX for gas--it's a sad little town, and there's not much else there. I didn't realize at the time that Dalhart was basically "ground zero" for the great dust bowl of the 1930's, though I probably could have guessed. It's one of those desolate, frozen-in-time places stuck in the 50s. Another familiar, featured (and, yes, desolate) location was the Comanche Grassland in Southern Colorado. There are only the odd cow, antelope and rattlesnakes out there now, and I can't imagine the area ever being plowed-up farmland--but if what Egan writes is accurate, almost every inch of US prairie was put to the plow by 1930, and hardly any untouched prairie remains today.
Tragedy is a common thread throughout the history of the American West--native people, animals, plants, even grasses were driven off, ripped up, and thrown out. The dust bowl fascinates me because it seems to been the first big clue in history to modern (Western/European) people that natural resources can be ruined and destroyed. Sod-busters plowed up the drought-resistant native grass, raked in a few years of bumper-crop wheat, then watched the very earth blow away from under them. This was a man-made environmental disaster on a grand scale, but while modern soil conservation practices have prevented this specific even from ever repeating itself (yet), it's hard not to wonder when and where nature will land her next punch. As a southwest resident myself, it's disturbing to me that we are draining our crumbling aquifers so that we can take 10 minute showers and have green lawns where only cactus should grow. The natural spring that fed a lovely pond and park in my neighborhood dried up this past winter (it had irrigated the area since before the 1900s) and I wonder if this, too, is another proverbial canary in the coalmine.
But I should wander back to my actual review--obviously this is a topic that interests me and still feels relevant today, and I'm guessing similar thoughts drove the National Book Award committee, too. However, I didn't feel that this book was organized as well as it could have been. The anecdotes of life during the dust bowl are vivid and interesting, but they don't always flow very well, and often feel literally cut and pasted together without transitions or logical arrangement. At some point I noticed that the details started repeating themselves (how prairie grass kept the dirt in place, rabbit drives, animals dying of dust consumption). It didn't really feel like it built up to anything "big", and was ultimately disappointed that the discussion of what has been done since the 30's to prevent future dust bowls, and could this happen again, was very short and tacked on as a brief epilogue. Still, I think that as an important, relevant subject, this is worth a read, especially by those of us living in the West.
Tragedy is a common thread throughout the history of the American West--native people, animals, plants, even grasses were driven off, ripped up, and thrown out. The dust bowl fascinates me because it seems to been the first big clue in history to modern (Western/European) people that natural resources can be ruined and destroyed. Sod-busters plowed up the drought-resistant native grass, raked in a few years of bumper-crop wheat, then watched the very earth blow away from under them. This was a man-made environmental disaster on a grand scale, but while modern soil conservation practices have prevented this specific even from ever repeating itself (yet), it's hard not to wonder when and where nature will land her next punch. As a southwest resident myself, it's disturbing to me that we are draining our crumbling aquifers so that we can take 10 minute showers and have green lawns where only cactus should grow. The natural spring that fed a lovely pond and park in my neighborhood dried up this past winter (it had irrigated the area since before the 1900s) and I wonder if this, too, is another proverbial canary in the coalmine.
But I should wander back to my actual review--obviously this is a topic that interests me and still feels relevant today, and I'm guessing similar thoughts drove the National Book Award committee, too. However, I didn't feel that this book was organized as well as it could have been. The anecdotes of life during the dust bowl are vivid and interesting, but they don't always flow very well, and often feel literally cut and pasted together without transitions or logical arrangement. At some point I noticed that the details started repeating themselves (how prairie grass kept the dirt in place, rabbit drives, animals dying of dust consumption). It didn't really feel like it built up to anything "big", and was ultimately disappointed that the discussion of what has been done since the 30's to prevent future dust bowls, and could this happen again, was very short and tacked on as a brief epilogue. Still, I think that as an important, relevant subject, this is worth a read, especially by those of us living in the West.
emilyusuallyreading's review against another edition
2.0
The stories about the worst of the dust storms are harrowing. I cannot imagine how anyone survived in the high plains at this time, and yet my grandma was one of them. She tells me of a memory when she was five years old and a dust storm hit during school. She and her classmates huddled in the classroom, frightened, and they could see through the window that the midday sky was as black as if it was the middle of the night. I was raised in the Texas Panhandle and I've seen small dust storms that gritted my teeth in dirt. I can't even picture in my mind the dusters that once damaged this area.
The book is long and dense, with details about this time period that may be delicious to a historian but that disinterested me. I found myself skimming through several chapters of this book, and left relatively unexcited.
The book is long and dense, with details about this time period that may be delicious to a historian but that disinterested me. I found myself skimming through several chapters of this book, and left relatively unexcited.