About this title: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains during the Depression, going from sod huts to new framed houses to basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Mariner Books, New York
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780618773473ISBN:0618773479
Description: Very Good + The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Mild edgewear, scuffs. Spine is uncreased. An excellent reading copy. Timothy Egan's brilliant & captivating exploration of the Great Depression & more specifically the trials and resiliency of the victims of the Dust Bowl famine, a lesser-known aspect of 20th century American tragedy. Highly recommended! read more
Description: Very Good. 0618773479 Paperback, Condition: Very Good; this book is in very good condition with light curve to the spine / light reading creases to the covers. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Date Published: 2005-12-14
ISBN-13:9780618346974ISBN:061834697X
Description: Like New. May be shiny, in some instances dust jackets are not included, no missing pages, no damage to binding, may have a remainder mark. read more
Description: New in new dust jacket. Glued binding. Paper over boards. With dust jacket. 340 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
"This really is can't-put-it-down history. Prior to reading this book, my knowledge of the Dust Bowl was limited to The Grapes of Wrath and a paragraph or two in a high school history textbook. Unlike The Grapes of Wrath, this book is focused on life for those people who didn't leave. It's a tragic chapter of American history conveyed through stories of several families interwoven with facts and observations such as the following: "The flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least arable part of the United States was transformed by government incentive, private showmanship, and human desire from the Great American Desert into Eden with a haircut." Very well done."
"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."
"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 believe Nebraska had it quite as hard as the "no man's land" in Oklahome and the panhandle of Texas that the author focused on.
At times I felt like screaming to the families in struggling to survive in the area: "Just run for your lives!" At other times I just wanted to cry, and as people from little babies to the elderly died of "dust pnemonia", I did just that. The author truly made the story come alive.
This is a stark, emotional and (as far as I can tell) accurate and well-researched history of those dark and awful times that some men brought on themselves, and others innocently found themselves stuck in. A mystery remains in my mind about how anyone could feel affection for the area after all they had been through, but some did."
"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 prose never drags.
Some of the descriptions of the stock market crash and the Great Depression hit a little too close to home, and the part of the epilogue that discusses current usage of the Ogallala aquifer makes me want to scream (though such water usage issues are certainly not exclusive to the mid-west). The Dust Bowl may have taught us a little, but clearly not enough. When I finished this I found myself wishing there was more to read."
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