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| The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Edition 001) | 
 enlarge | Author: Timothy Egan
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  196 reviews
Sales Rank: 789
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0618773479
Dewey Decimal Number: 978.032
EAN: 9780618773473
ASIN: 0618773479
Publication Date: September 1, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 The best of books about the worst of times December 21, 2005
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
My father Bill Downing, was born on a homestead in Indian territory on April 13th 1906, one of eight children of a dry land farmer and livestock trader who drifted from Iowa to the high plains scratching out a living from virgin grasslands. My mother was born in a dugout close to Delphus switch on the Santa Fe line somewhere near Clovis, New Mexico, Dec. 8th 1910. I was born on July 7th 1935 in Canyon,Texas, three months after Black Sunday. This book came to me like a "ghost from Christmas's past"
When I heard an interview with the author on PBS radio I knew I had been deeply touched by my family heritage. I confess I am a child of the depression and of the dust bowl era.
For me this was a hard book to read but impossible to put down. The stories of the real people and events were at times so imbedded in my heart before I read them that I sometimes had to take time to catch my breath and wash the blow dirt out of my eyes and hair before I could read more.
Timothy Egan did his interviews and research on this historical event very well, and has artfully woven them into a true story of heroism, stubborn persistance, ignorance and individual, governmental and societal greed and incompetence. The combination destroyed the great grasslands of North America and the dreams of millions of families and left a scar on the them both. He has also told the story of those on the farms and in government who asked the questions. "What went wrong?", "Can it be fixed?", and "How do we heal a two-fold disaster?" His window into the government and all levels of politics of the period will inform the reader concerned about government and politics of today. When I remember watching my father drill a well in our back yard with a rope, pully, "A" frame and a sharp pipe, or think of the hours I spent turning the soil for our "Victory garden", I am remembering frontier skills.
The view I enjoyed from the top of our windmill was the 80 acre pasture for our milk cow starting just past our front yard. A half mile away were two old farms with shelter belt trees and buried fence posts and the only flowing creek in many miles. Looking over our cow lot and chicken house behind our house I saw five blocks away West Texas State College.
I started first grade on that campus and graduated from the college sixteen years later. As I walked up the slope to school against blue and brown northers, I vowed to leave that country. when I could. Most of my adult life has been spent where the March winds don't start in January and end in July and you could find water deep enough to play in and trees. That doesn't deminish my love and respect for the people who toughed it out and made a life for them selves. I have never met friendlier more loving and compassionate people than small town panhandle farm folks. I believe that going through the worst hard times killed off some, made some a bit strange, and opened the heart of most. I still like to spend time in the old dust bowl country and then go home before the wing throws another handful of gravel in my face.
An incredible book about a neglected part of American history... August 25, 2006
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
This ranks as one of the best books I've ever read... The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. It stunned me on a number of levels.
For those unfamiliar with the term "Dust Bowl" (and that's most Americans in reality), it refers to a period of history when the Great Plains area of the United States experienced a phenomenon known as dust storms. The Great Plains is the central portion of the US, and includes parts of states like Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas. I think the vast majority of Americans who don't come from that area think of the Dust Bowl as a couple of paragraphs in their history books, and something that happened during the Great Depression in 1929. That's what I thought, but the truth is far more devastating.
Egan tells the story of the Dust Bowl through the lives of six different families who came to the area to settle down, create their homestead, and start farming. The "Great American Desert" was touted as the next great opportunity to own land and earn a fortune, and hundreds of thousands did just that. But to make this happen, our government had to clear out the Native Americans already there. That meant exterminating the buffalo. Once that was done, the Indians were forced to move because their way of life was destroyed. The homesteaders came in, and started ripping up the field grass to plant crops. However, the area was far too arid to support the new farming and overuse, and the winds started to carry off the top soil. Coupled with a severe drought, the entire ecosystem was destroyed and that started a chain of events that really never gets told in this level of detail...
The settlers came in the 1920's and that's when the destruction of the plains occurred. When the stock market crash of 1929 started the Great Depression, the prices for crops collapsed. People planted more to earn less, and the vicious cycle continued to the point where the cost of the farming exceeded the price for the crops. The drought that led to the dust storms lasted not just a season or two, but throughout the entire decade of the 1930's. And the dusters... We're talking storms that were miles long, that would last for days, and that completely blotted out the sun. You had minutes to react, and if you were caught outside you would likely die of suffocation. Children especially were susceptible to "dust pneumonia", and the death rate was staggering. Families lost absolutely everything, but there was nowhere to go because the entire country was broke. This environment is what greeted Franklin Roosevelt when he came into office, and knowing this makes the "New Deal" much more understandable. For over 10 years, people couldn't grow crops, get relief from the dust, wind, and heat, and watched whole communities wither and die... literally. I really can't do justice to the stories and experiences that are told in this book.
There were so many things that hit me when reading this.... How could we be so ignorant of such a major event in our history? It makes hurricane Katrina look like a minor incident. Why do we think elected government officials have some magic knowledge or insight as to how things work? They are as clueless as the electorate (doesn't matter which party, either). How come we Americans have felt that we have a right to take everything we can from the environment with no thought as to whether it's sustainable? And how many of our "informed decisions" based on our "advanced technology" will look just as stupid 50 years from now as the ones made back then? We really don't learn from our mistakes, and we have no sense of history... only "now".
To my liberal friends... I'm not ready to sign up for the Green party and go hug a tree. But I'm far more likely to give the time of day to an environmentalist now than I ever was before. There is a line between preservation and conservation, but we're not even in that ballpark most of the time. This is an incredible book, and one that I highly recommend...
 The Worst Hard Time February 15, 2007
19 out of 30 found this review helpful
The disaster that we call the dust bowl was horrendous, arguably the worst period of the twentieth century. That it coincided with an international depression made it worse. It is important that we not forget what happened, the factors that caused it to occur, and how the situation was remedied. "The Worst Hard Time" addresses this historic period and focuses mainly on the area most impacted by the dust bowl. In a generally chronological fashion, the author devotes about a third of the book to the period leading up to the dust bowl era.
He has selected a handful of individuals and weaves their histories throughout the book. Likewise, the book chronicles histories of selected towns and counties in Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Kansas.
The author is a good wordsmith and provides some memorable images and phrases. A reader can open the book almost anywhere and enjoy reading a few pages.
It appears that the author has reviewed a good many books, newspapers, and other accounts. Included are personal interviews, oftentimes with descendents of people who lived in the dust bowl. You can almost see the author jotting notes on the morsels that catch his interest. He then dramatized them and put them all into this book, sometimes forcing them into the narrative.
The book is presented as history, but at best it could be called a historical novel. Events and details are amplified and combined in such a way that they mislead or are incorrect. The author puts thoughts into people's heads and words into their mouths that may be accurate and in context, or might not be.
Readers with a predisposition to hating the "establishment" - government and big business - will find validation in this book. However, the "worst hard time" was due to a number of factors besides drought and mismanagement of land. What happened must be understood in terms of the political, economic, and social context. World War I was a factor. True, the land in the area of the dust bowl was misused and mismanaged. People died and lives were destroyed. Nevertheless, the establishment did a lot to bring about the end of the "worst hard time." The dust bowl area is prosperous and productive today. "Establishment" agencies such as the Soil Conservation Service and Civilian Conservation Corps helped to make it that way and to keep it producing. The book gives credit for that effort, one of the few positive segments of the narrative. Contrary to the negative picture this book paints, there were people who lived through the 1930s, managing to raise families and have a good deal of fun along the way. The people and the government that mismanaged the land that later turned to dust were well-intentioned and reaching into the unknown. It is unfair to cast blame based on hindsight. If we, the people, are to avoid such disasters in the future, we must work collectively and that requires the "establishment."
This book is endlessly repetitive - how many ways can someone describe an approaching dust storm or the ways dust can get into a house? The narrative jumps back and forth between people, places, and time in a bewildering fashion. Despite being the product of a wordsmith, the book is poorly composed and edited. The history narrated by this book can be told in less than twenty pages; a little research will uncover a number of web sites doing it in even less. It would be criminal to assign a student to read this book.
The necessity of understanding the "worst hard time" is to avoid making similar mistakes. Perhaps overuse of the Ogallala Aquifer or the failure to reduce the release of greenhouse gases will lead to similar "natural" disasters. Hopefully, readers of this book will raise such questions and work to bring about the changes needed to avoid other times as painful as the 1930s.
 Dry as dust January 8, 2006
16 out of 26 found this review helpful
Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time" proffers a look at the Dust Bowl from a slightly different perspective than most Americans are familiar...he tells it from the inside out. This is not a book about the Okies who packed up and moved west. "The Worst Hard Time" puts its focus on citizens of Dalhart, Texas and Boise City, Oklahoma (to name few) and details their struggles to survive years of drought and misery. To Egan's credit, it's a good start.
The author is at his best when he chronicles an overall view of what it was like to live in the Dust Bowl...an area that stretched from the Texas panhandle to southern Nebraska and included portions of six states. He reminds us that the cause of the problems during a decade-long recurrence of "dusters" were largely man-made. The rape of native grasslands through plowing so weakened the soil and existing plants that the land was ripe for storms on the magnitude of which he describes. Egan, as an historian, informs well, although after mentioning several times that the dusters caused terrific amounts of static electricity, (enough to knock down a man) he never gives us a clue as to how or why that electricity accumulated its power.
The problem with this book is that the narrative is as dry as the conditions upon which he comments. The half dozen or so people whom the author settles upon don't seem to win much more than a skirting empathy as one wonders if they really weren't well enough put together to follow their neighbors away. Except for some wonderful diary entries by Don Hartwell of Inavale, Nebraska (who stayed until the bitter end) and a chapter on Black Sunday, Egan misses terrific opportunities to liven up his own work. A storyteller he is not.
There are many surviviors still around from those days on the High Plains. It would be nice to see a book about their experiences told in their own words, as Don Hartwell had done. "The Worst Hard Time" delivers some good information, but unlike the dusters, it never gets off the ground.
A story that needs to be told again and again....Americans should never forget the "Dust Bowl". January 3, 2006
15 out of 19 found this review helpful
It is one of the most gut-wrenching books I have ever read. Like an episode of the old TV series "Time Tunnel" author Timothy Egan transports the reader back to the Great Plains in the 1930's. The stories of personal hardship and determination in "The Worst Hard Time" will likely hit you like a ton of bricks. This is a story that needs to be told again and again. As you will learn in "The Worst Hard Time" what would be forever known as the "Dust Bowl" was a largely self-imposed tragedy. It is extremely important that the American people understand just what went wrong with the land in America's mid-section during those tumultuous years and to learn the lessons from this monumental environmental disaster.
Prior to reading "The Worst Hard Time" my knowledge of the calamity known as the "Dust Bowl" was limited to not much more than a passing reference in a high school history book and perhaps a few articles in the newspaper. I simply had no idea of the scope and the magnitude of this tragedy. In "The Worst Hard Time" Timothy Egan introduces us to a half dozen or so families who would settle various parts of this region. These were hardy folks who came to settle in this area from many different places and for a variety of reasons. It was the height of the Great Depression and for most the lure of farming your own tract of land was just too enticing to pass up. For an all too brief time it appeared to be a wise decision. But as the 1930's progressed most of the people who had settled in places like Boise City in the Oklahoma panhandle, Dalhart in Northwestern Texas or Cimmaron County, New Mexico would rue the day they decided to settle there. Something had gone horribly wrong with the land. Most would experience unspeakable hardship over the next several years and lose practically everything. Surely, "The Worst Hard Time" is an apt description of what went on.
Aside from Timothy Egan's exceptionally well-written narrative "The Worst Hard Time" also presents a series of unforgettable photographs that will leave you with an indelible image of the landscape in places like "No Man's Land" and Baca County, Colorado during the height of the "Dust Bowl". These scenes will break your heart and make you wonder how these people were able to cope with such devastation and economic deprivation. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of a crisis where millions upon millions of tons of prime topsoil blow away in violent storms. In less than a generation what had been hundreds of millions of acres of prime grasslands had been destroyed, perhaps forever. Discover just who was to blame for this calamity and learn about FDR's ambitious plans to resuscitate the area.
With "The Worst Hard Time" Timothy Egan brings the spectacle of the "Dust Bowl" to the attention of a new generation of Americans. Aside from reacquainting all of us with the who, what, when and where of this unfortunate chapter in American history, Egan reminds of the important environmental lessons that we should have learned from these events. The "Dust Bowl" was an environmental disaster of nearly biblical proportions. And it could happen again. Towards the end of the book Timothy Egan discusses some of highly questionable policies being pursued in the Great Plains even to this day. They seem incredibly foolhardy to me. But judge for yourself. "The Worst Hard Time" is an important book that should find its way into every library in America. This is history at its absolute best. Highly recommended!.
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