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Loading... The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great… (original 2006; edition 2006)by Timothy Egan (Author)
Work InformationThe Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan (2006)
  
Top Five Books of 2014 (174) » 8 more No current Talk conversations about this book. I especially enjoyed the personal stories of the people who settled in "no man's land". Many people stayed despite having no money, no crops and family dying from breathing the dust. The pictures of the dust storms really added to the story. I can't imagine living in that area at that time. (  ) dara85 | Jun 2, 2023 |  Finished! This incident in history was one we probably just glanced over when I was in school. It was quite interesting until a little over midway in the book when I had to start going up to 1.25x of 1.3x to make it through the book. Quite lengthy to listen ( ) drmom62 | Apr 21, 2023 | Timothy Egan won the National Book Award for, The Worse Hard Time, in 2006. Reviewing a book already given high recognition obliges the reviewer to make a case of, why such an award. Egan quotes from Don Hartwell’s diary extensively – a diary saved from the fires and donated to the Nebraska Historical Society in Lincoln. He begins the book by introducing us to Liz and Bam White -- a half Indian half white cowboy turned farmer. Doc Dawson’s switch from medicine to the tragedy of Dust Bowl farming offers one among many family tragedies. The despondency the reader feels at the book’s conclusion one of many reasons for reading the book. Half the folks from the Plains did not survive the Dust Bowl. They moved away forever or died from the pervasive, “dust pneumonia,” which afflicted the families, especially children. One notable exception to the large exodus hooks Egan’s attention – and ours: a son, Ike Osteen. He left for road and railroad work upon graduation, leaving the ruined farm to his brother, Oscar. Ike proceeded to survive D-Day landing at Normandy to return and raise a family. At the story’s conclusion, in 2006, he was ninety years old and continued to work every day of the week. Unlike Ike, many families stayed on because they were too numb and worn out to pick up and start elsewhere. Time and again, Egan emphasizes what FDR’s soil conservation czar, Hugh Bennett, repeated: the buffalo grass and blue stem of the Plains which got plowed up to make a killing when wheat brought good money was cause for the tragedy. Later, after the disaster, Hugh Bennett organized farmers to cooperate in plowing in contours and planting grass. The government helped by buying up millions of acres for replanting. FDR put the CCC to work in planting 220 million trees. Alas, in 1940, the forerunners of Agri-business began drilling down into the Ogallala Aquifer to again begin planting wheat. “The Ogallala was there for the taking, just like the grassland itself thirty years earlier,” writes Egan. Geologists estimate the Aquifer will be dry by the turn of the century. A tragedy to be repeated. The climate had not changed in the Plains. Human beings caused it to change. This is Egan’s message. When “the plow that broke the plains,” began at the turn of the century, only two groups understood the disaster awaiting caused by stripping the land of its native vegetation -- the local cowboys who, with the cattle gone, were out of work, and the Comanches, thrown off the land by whites. Neither group ever returned. If climate change was making the same headlines when Egan finished his book as it is today, perhaps he would have drawn parallels between the human caused Dust Bowl of the 30’s to the human caused climate change of today. One parallel he would not make. Today, we have a clear understanding of the cause. There is no excuse. (  ) forestormes | Dec 25, 2022 | If you are leary of the arrogant statement that man's little behaviors can create exponential disasters on Earth, this book may change your mind. It is also a testament to the level that man will allow themselves and their families to be tortured, just to avoid social insecurities... Written for the readers who truly crave wonderful historical content because the delivery is factual and amazingly researched and woven together, but like the dust - it can be both wonderously awesome and painfully dry... ( )1  WiserWisegirl | Dec 2, 2022 | If you are leary of the arrogant statement that man's little behaviors can create exponential disasters on Earth, this book may change your mind. It is also a testament to the level that man will allow themselves and their families to be tortured, just to avoid social insecurities... Written for the readers who truly crave wonderful historical content because the delivery is factual and amazingly researched and woven together, but like the dust - it can be both wonderously awesome and painfully dry... ( ) WiserWisegirl | Dec 2, 2022 |
The Worst Hard Time," takes the shape of a classic disaster tale. We meet the central characters (the "nesters" who farmed around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles); dire warnings (against plowing) are voiced but ignored; and then all hell breaks loose. Ten-thousand-foot-high dust storms whip across the landscape, choking people and animals, and eventually laying waste to one of the richest ecosystems on earth. Racing at 50 miles an hour, the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930's blasted paint off buildings; soil crushed trees, dented cars and drifted into 50-foot dunes. Tsunamis of grasshoppers devoured anything that drought, hail and tornadoes had spared. To the settlers, "it seemed on many days as if a curtain were being drawn across a vast stage at world's end." Families couldn't huddle together for warmth or love: the static electricity would knock them down. Children died of dust pneumonia, and livestock suffocated on dirt, their insides packed with soil. Women hung wet sheets in windows, taped doors and stuffed cracks with rags. None of this really worked. Housecleaning, in this era, was performed with a shovel. On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children. Has as a student's study guide
"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived - those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave - Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression." No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)978.032History and Geography North America Western U.S. 1900-LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.16)
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