Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006)
Author: Timothy Egan
Genre: Nonfiction (History)
Book Summary:
In The Worst Hard Time, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2006, Egan delves headfirst into the dark and gritty history of one of the worst manmade ecological disasters in history, the Great Plains Dustbowl of the Depression years. Relying on many interviews with survivors of the Dustbowl years, Egan divides his story into three parts. In the first part, "Promise," he explores the "Great Plowup" of the first decades of the twentieth century, when the government and railroads, offering free land and a prosperous future, enticed thousands of people to the semiarid, marginal land of the High Plains. During these years, record demand for wheat, new dryland farming techniques, and several extraordinarily wet years convinced sodbusters to plow up nearly all of what had been untouched grasslands - setting the stage for the tragedy to come. In the second section, "Betrayal," Egan discusses the stock market crash and opening years of the Great Depression. During this period, the High Plains region was still producing bumber crops, but the bottom dropped out of the wheat market and no one was buying. Finally, in the third section, Egan gives us a portrayal of the "Blowup", in which drought hits the region, and millions of acres of plowed land, uncultivated for several years, dries out, sending hundreds of thousands of tons of topsoil into the air in the great duststorms that ruined the region and the hopes of the people who homesteaded there.
Geographical Setting: Great Plains (the "Dust Bowl")
Time Period: 1920s and 1930s
Appeal Characteristics:
Egan is a riveting storyteller, painting the harsh, desolate land of the High Plains in such stark, vivid detail that the reader feels like they are there with the tough settlers of this land. The backbone of Egan's tale are the people - grizzled cowboys, immigrants on their last chance, young mothers watching their babies die of "dust pneumonia" - each person comes to life as vividly as characters in a novel, although every person mentioned in the book really lived through the Dustbowl. Drawing on countless interviews with Dustbowl survivors, Egan manages to avoid a dry, clinical tone, instead immersing readers completely in the horror of the great dust storms. This is a fast-paced read that flows like a novel, with a firm basis in real history. With plenty of detailed historical and ecological facts provided, this book will hold great appeal for readers interested in the history of American settlement of the West, the Great Depression years, or manmade ecological disasters.
Read-alikes: Timothy Egan, a New york Times reporter, has also written several other books, and readers who are drawn to his literate and sharply-drawn style will want to read The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, his exploration of the history and people of the Pacific Northwest. As in The Worst Hard Time, Egan lets the people themselves tell the story, relying heavily on in-depth interviews. Another great read for those interested in a fictional account of the Great Depression and Dustbowl Period is the classic John Steinbeck novel, The Grapes of Wrath, the story of a family of "Okies" leaving the ravaged Dustbowl land behind for California. Readers who loved the people of The Worst Hard Time will find Steinbeck's characters familiar and just as roughly endearing. If you're interested in a much more recent exploration of human-caused climate changes and ecological disasters, you might want to try Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert, which explores the hand that humans have had in recent climage change and global warming. Another great, fast-paced nonfiction read to try is Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, which covers another natural disaster in American history with the same attention to detail and storytelling skills that Egan brought to The Worst Hard Time. Finally, readers might also enjoy Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, by David von Drehle. This is the story of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that killed hundreds and led to the labor movement which changed many of our laws to protect workers and their safety. Relying on many first-hand accounts, newspaper articles, and trial transcripts, von Drehle, like Egan, brings the period and its people to vivid life.
Red Flags: None - unless you really hate nonfiction.
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