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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Timothy Egan
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My mother's side of the family are Okies. They are folks that came out to California during the Dust Bowl, survived all of the travails of being not wanted in California, and so I knew about personally from my own family. Well, it's about something that I didn't know really almost existed. I'd sort of had the misunderstanding that when the Dust Bowl hit of that era, in the early 30's, late 20's, early 30's, I thought that everyone left that area -- Texas, Oklahoma -- and came to California.
This is a book about all those who stayed, and this is a combination of personal narrative -- he focuses on maybe a half a dozen families -- it's a phenomenal book in that it is a book that can be written not but probably can't be written 20 years from now, which is to say the author has really specific information that he has gotten from people who are still alive today who went through the dust bowl, who went through the dust storms.
The story talks about how there was a series of unique weather phenomens, there was a series of 4 or 5 years of great weather, great rain in the great plains. And then of course the drought hit, the drought was more of a consistent weather pattern for that-that part of the country. And in a fascinating parallel to our current concerns about global warming the brightest minds of that time, the political leaders, the scientists at that time couldn’t tell if the phenomenon was happening in that part of the country, in the great plains, was that something that was simply a weather cycle or if it wasn’t something that humans had brought on.
It won the Pulitzer prize or the National Book Award, that type of thing, I look for those books because they tend to be of high quality. Yeah, 5 stars out of 5 stars, it was spectacular. It was probably one of the best books I read over the summer.
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