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