A review by emilyusuallyreading
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

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.