The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story Of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
A good book...a thorough history...but dry as a throat full of sawdust in the middle of the desert. That about sums it up, but of course I will continue to babble on for a few more paragraphs. Before reading this book, I knew next to nothing about the Dust Bowl and the cataclysmic storms that occurred in the 1930‘s, primarily in the area of the U.S. known as the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma (see map): If you're like me in this respect, than this book is a very worthwhile read, assuming you have at least a slight interest in the history of this period. Looking at the photos above and reading descriptions of the sky appearing as if a black curtain had been draped over the sky, an effect that could last days at a time, was a serious jaw falling with concomitant eye-bulge experience. As the book chronicles, the dust storms were caused by decades of massive over-farming in the panhandles and surrounding areas without the use of wind erosion prevention techniques (e.g., crop rotation, cover crops and use of fallow fields). Add to this man-made component mother nature's contribution of a severe and prolonged drought and you have all the makings of a seriously horrific dust up. The over-farming was the result of the momentous drop in commodity prices that followed the Stock Market Crash of 1929. The price of wheat, corn and other crops grown in the panhandles plummeted, forcing farmers to farm more and more land, more and more often, just to try and make ends meet. Unfortunately, this increased in the volume of these commodities, along with a sharp decrease in demand resulting from the Great Depression, caused the plummeting prices to move into crash mode, where they free fell further and faster than Brittany Spears reputation and self esteem. It was the disastrous, crushing economic conditions facing these farmers that made the onset, the fierceness, and the prolonged nature of the “Dust Bowl” truly worthy of the title “The Worst Hard Time.” The author does a good job of laying out the facts in a very readable manner. Thus, as a history book, this novel is excellent. It cogently lays out the history of the region, going back to its settlement by mostly German-Russian immigrants. It also gives a decent background of the situation in the rest of the U.S., and provides a good step by step progression of the events leading up to the beginning of the dust storms in the early 1930s. So why only 3 stars? Mostly because I've been seriously spoiled by historical writers like David McCullough, Barbara Tuchman and Gordon Wood. These three (and several others that I am sure I am forgetting right now) write amazingly detailed histories, while at the same time providing such rich and engaging background and individual anecdotes that their histories come alive and you feel immersed in the period. Odd as it sounds, I guess you could say that I was disappointed that I didn’t feel sacks of dust pouring into my mouth or the blinding sting of the storm ripping into my skin. I wanted Mr. Egan to throw me in the middle of Black Sunday and tell me to hold on for dear life. Instead, I mostly got dryness (no pun). I got less than compelling personal stories and no real emotional evocation or dramatic tension. It was the story of the dust storms as done by CNN when what I really wanted was a stellar, kick-ass miniseries by HBO. Granted, these criticisms are mostly the result of McCullough, Tuchman and Wood being such saucy bitches that they make everyone else look bad by comparison. That is probably unfair to Mr. Egan, but in the cut throat, sink or swim world of competitive history writing, I say tough mammaries, Mr. Egan. Sack up and step up your drama. Still, a good, well-researched history about an intriguing and previously mysterious period, but a little too dry and textbook like to earn a 4th star from me. 3 0 stars. Recommended.
4.5 STARSI remember asking my grandmother about her life growing up and she told me she grew up in Colorado during the Dust Bowl. She showed me pictures of the family standing outside in a baron, dry looking area and I thought, "oh, she live in an area that had a drought". It is apparent to me, that I had absolutely no clue what this meant before reading this book.I'd like to preface this review by saying that I found this book engaging and it kept my interest all the way through even though it is jam packed with so many facts and statistics (I love stats!).I did not realize there was a direct connection between the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl was caused when farmers chose to tilled up native grasses to plant more cash crops after the market prices started to fall. At the time farmers were not schooled in land management and crop rotation practices that would have prevented soil erosion. After the natives grasses were removed, there was no longer any root system in place to prevent the soil from simply blowing away. The instances where the soil was simply blown away turned it to large dust storms. Persons trying to navigate through these dust storms could sometimes see no more than a foot in front of them and others were killed from suffocation or dust pneumonia. There are several pictures available and the sheer size of the cloud is enough to give you the willies. After these storms, there were "drifts" of dirt and people would often have to dig out there home or livestock. Most of the Great Plains area was affected by the Dust Bowl, which includes the area from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains from North Dakota to the Texas panhandle.Many people lived in dugouts, which literally, was hole dug into the ground where a family could take shelter. Since the Dust Bowl happened during the depression years, people already had so little money available that when the soil blew away the farmers in these areas were not able to grow enough to feed their own families, so obviously they had no cash to build and maintain a structure. The descriptions of these dugouts reminded me of Half Broke Horses. When reading that story, I thought living in the dugout was just crazy, but now I believe it to be more of the norm for that time.People had limited means available during this period and families were often separated just to stay alive, leaving the man on the farm and other family members going off to live with relatives in cities. This would definitely contribute to the decline in birth rates during the Great Depression/Dust Bowl years.How did we get ourselves out of this mess you say? Well it appears our champion was Big Hugh Bennett, know as the Father of Soil Conservation. Bennett made many observation regarding soil erosion and eventually worked his way to heading the Soil Erosion Service for the Department of the Interior. In this role he was able to reach out to farming communities to teach them how to plant cover crops, build anti-erosion structures, etc. Although Bennett's methods helped recover areas destroyed by the Dust Bowl, there are still many areas that, even today, have not recovered from the disaster.If you enjoy non-fiction and/or US history, you are sure to enjoy this read. Highly Recommended!
What do You think about The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story Of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl (2006)?
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?
—Steve
An enlightening narrative on the lives of hardy sod busters in Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and other states. I learned that the dust storms weren't just a random phenomena, but aggravated grasslands that had been plowed up and then scorched in the hot sun in rapid succession. The frenzy of the roaring twenties, new home goods stores, and credit and loaning set the stage for this oppressive decade in American history, both politically and agriculturally. #consequences ... Anyways, many made it through, learned a lesson, and lived to tell another story.
—Allison Anderson
Egan's *Worst Hard Time* is intriguing and largely well done, if a bit relentless. Granted, he's writing about a phenomenon that dragged on for years, repeatedly raising and dashing ever-slimmer hopes; the people who lived the "Dust Bowl" years were literally worn out, but Egan needed to do something more with the material than recreate that sensation. Toward the last third of the book, in particular, a kind of sameness creeps into the narrative, as if Egan didn't really know what else to say -- which I suspect is connected to my sense that he relied too much on too few sources (including a diary that he overuses) -- and his slightly jerky style gets distracting (he's not a great one for writing transitions). For me, one failing is that Egan never explains, in any specific way, the origin and cause of the "black dusters" and other freakish weather phenomena of the "Dust Bowl" era. He tells us that the dust storms came because the topsoil had been carved off by overfarming (and then aggravated by the abandonment of unsuccessful farms), but a meteorological or ecological explanation - even a nontechnical one - wouldn't have been a bad idea. His description of the CCC efforts at re-grassing the plains left me with significant questions that he doesn't answer: Given that the dust storms continued unabated throughout the effort, what was the government's strategy for protecting the newly planted grass during the time it would have taken for it to mature enough to hold the soil? And how did they water it? In addition, I'd have appreciated a more substantive "bring us up to date" chapter at the end that explained more clearly what happened in the wake of the human and policy failures of the Dust Bowl. Nor would a little class analysis have hurt -- other than wagging a kind of general finger at get-rich schemes perpetrated both by private interests and by the government, he seems careful not to accuse anybody too directly of creating an ecological disaster, of maiming (psychologically and literally) and killing tens of thousands of people, or of engaging in a kind of class warfare that embodied the ferocious social Darwinism of Depression-era capitalism. Finally, I'd just point out that the book isn't really the story of "survivors" of the Dust Bowl; there are essentially no survivors, and this is no movie-of-the-week tale of grit, courage, and heroism that win out in the end. The people Egan follows are bleak and broken, and their desperation is palpable. *Worst Hard Time* begs the question: Is there any redemption? I think Egan knows there was none, but he seems loathe to say it in so many words.
—Wendell
