The Worst Hard Time
The Worst Hard Time
The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 8 secondsThe Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan was initially a book I selected from the e-library because nothing else I wanted to read was available. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down.
Now that we have had the warmest summer since 1936 during the dust bowl, the book has even more meaning.
According to The New York Times,
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect.”
With the likelihood of more ecological catastrophes in the immediate future, this is a book I highly recommend.
