The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl―A National Book Award Winner

Timothy Egan relates that it was a son of Kansas, Roy Emerson Stryker, who came up with the idea of creating a record of American decay for the files of the Farm Security Administration, and "...the government photo unit proved to be one of the lasting and most popular contributions of the New Deal..." Americans familiar with their history have the images taken by Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange during the Great Depression as part of their cultural baggage, and Egan expands that to the work of Arthur Rothstein, and others, who were just out of college, and told to stay in the "field", and get to know the people. The images of the immense ecological disaster that was dubbed "the Dust Bowl" are not properly honored with even the word "haunting."Egan has written a magnificent, heart-breaking history of the "the Dust Bowl" area during the `30's. Much of the specific history was new to me, and thus confirmed Truman's dictum that there is nothing new in the world except the history that you did not know. I had recently re-read Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," which Egan briefly touches upon, pointing out correctly that Tom Joad and his family came from eastern Oklahoma, whereas the true dust bowl encompassed only western Oklahoma. I felt Egan's one map, outlining where the area of the dust bowl was, most illuminating. Both Steinbeck's and Egan's books are damning indictments of so-called "market forces" unleashed without an overall structure of prudent rules set by society, as administered by the government. Egan did however cover the impudent rules that society and the government advocated, which encouraged the settlement and farming of the land west of the 100th meridian which was the root cause of the dust bowl.Egan tells the story of the worst hard times through the eyes of those who experienced it, via interviews with them, or their children, accompanied by surviving diaries and the newspaper stories of the day. He doesn't say how or why he selected certain people, but I felt that they were a representative sampling, from Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Of the stories that were particularly memorable, I found the ones of the "Volga Germans" who settled in Shattuck, OK. They had been recruited by Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (who was actually German) to settle on the Volga river. They were given incentives to do so, like exemption from conscription. When these were removed, 150 years later, by Czar Alexander II, they left in mass, and settled in the USA. The epicenter of Egan's stories, and no doubt research, seemed to be Dalhart, Texas, in the northwest corner of the panhandle. The author starts his book with the story of Bam White, part Indian, whose horses could not carry his family any further south into Texas, so he had to stop in Delhart. Bam was in the most famous movie made about the dust bowl, and was shunned by much of the population of the area for this role. Another very memorable character from Delhart was the indominable promoter and newspaper editor, John L McCarty. He was a founding member of the "Last Man Club," pledging that they would never leave, a pledge that he broke, when "he got a better deal." I also found the stories of set in the Oklahoma panhandle, which was once called "no man's land" also quite illuminating.I read a few of the 1-star reviews, found their criticism of little merit. One did not like the endless stories about the dust storms, which I found a strength of the book. Egan explained well the whole trajectory of the area's residents from hope and defiance through resignation and defeat. As Egan says on p 242: "The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine, on harvest day, from victory stands."Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was the catalyst for a trip to Garden City, Kansas a year ago, to see the feedlots there. Pollan declares that afterwards it would take "a supreme act of forgetting to ever eat meat again." On the way, I drove through Dalhart, and on the way back, I drove through Boise City, OK (named, as Egan points out, after the French word, "bois," for woods, of which there are none except in the fevered imagination of the real estate promoters.) I stopped in Keys, OK, and photographed the still extant devastation, the abandoned houses, and shuttered businesses. Egan's book will force a return trip, now that he has helped me "see" what I was oblivious too the last time.On last year's trip it was quite apparent that both the panhandles of OK and TX continue to struggle, yet the area around Garden City, KS seemed relatively prosperous. Sadly, Egan explains some of this in his epilogue: "So cotton growing, siphoning from the Ogallala (underground reservoir) get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart. The aquifer is declining at a rate of 1.1 million acre-feet a day... In parts of the Texas Panhandle, hydrologists say, the water will be gone by 2010."Plus ca change...Egan's book certainly deserves the National Book Award. An excellent, informative read.

This is a great look at the dust bowl many of us have forgotten. Interesting way both the progressive and conservative elements disagreed just as we do today and always come down on what benefits us now. Gives you much to think a bout. Great read I like this author.

This is the second time. I have read this incredible book. I bought it when it was first released, and now, during THESE times, I felt the need to read it again. It was available to read on my Kindle, so that made it an even easier decision.Timothy Egan brings to ...life?...a stunning and heart wrenching account of this period in America's history that has left me shaking my head in disbelief to this day. Mr. Egan managed to find one of the few survivors of this devastating decade, someone who was THERE. Many diaries and newspaper articles are included as well, but the writer's skill really lets us know how horrific this time was.One can almost feel and see the dust storms that, after a couple of years, were a DAILY occurrence. When I say "dust storm" that may conjure up and little twister weaving through the plains. Oh, no. These storms were massive, huge, and deadly. People who had moved to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas; to get a new start on life, and farm, to have something they could call THEIRS; well, I cannot imagine their suffering. I admire many of them for staying, but why did they? This area was called "No Man's Land", and that is exactly what it was .Banks refused to loan money to those who wanted to go there and farm. But never fear! The Homestead Act came along, and large tracts of land could be purchased for pennies. That land was not worth even that, but people bought it. This book goes into amazing detail about this time, you won't want to put it down.Egan writes the book with some main characters we get to know, then winds their nightmare story throughout the book, people come, people go, people choose to stay...When Herbert Hoover was president, at the beginning, farmers and their families did OK...too much wheat was grown, WW I had ended, and it "wasn't needed." But it was! No one would buy the wheat, so when Hoover was asked to help these people and buy some wheat, he said no. Unbelievable.Then, land that should never have been farmed in the first place turned on everyone and everything, rolling in from the southwest, so eerie and mind boggling that the National Weather Service had no name for it! Sadly, it was not a fluke, and things would only get worse.These massive "Dusters" as they came to be called, would arrive at any time of the day, one could not predict when, but they came. EVERY DAY. They were huge, dark, and horrific. Poor helpless animals died where they stood. People and their cars and houses had to be dug out of them. EVERY DAY for.....years! The Dustbowl covered 100 million acres, an area the size of Pennsylvania was ruined, and yet, only a third of the people left!When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, he LISTENED. He begged people to stop trying to farm this land, and he sent an Agronomists and every expert you can imagine to this area: and what they discovered was not good news. Their report was given to the president, who felt so much for these people, and did what little he could to help. The land had been "farmed out", and it seems MAN was the cause of this catastrophe, not the weather. Man. The millions of Bison who had once roamed this area were now almost extinct. That was, of course, man's doing. So, with the Indians gone and the buffalo grass turned over by the "farmers", the soil poorly tilled or left abandoned, it was basically useless.You will not believe the trials these people who chose to stay endured. I kept thinking, "and we are complaint NOW?" The tenacity of the homesteaders, men and women, and their children, and their suffering and grief is heart wrenching.Personal accounts written by people who were there, gave me insight into what we would now consider absolutely intolerable.I would write more, but I'll let the reader discover how centipedes, spiders, dust, hunger, and worse, shaped the lives of the people in this area. This book should be on reading lists in high school. We today, have NO idea about this. Well, I didn't.Note: this is NOT a book about the Great Depression, even though these were Depression years. It's a book about men and women and land, and what happens when people decide to "make up their minds", and learn horrible lessons. Excellent, informative, and wonderfully written.

The author writes about all facets of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s using diverse sources. It is a great read by a talented writer about a tragic chapter in American life. Wonderful portraits of families and communities and how they adapted to horrific conditions. Best book I've read in years.

I was surprised and loved the amount of history in this book, there was way more to this then just talking about dust storms. It was a book I couldn’t put down and well written. You won’t be disappointed.

We are fantastically ignorant when it comes to nature. We think we can do whatever the hell we like. This is proof that we can’t, shouldn’t and mustn’t.

Brilliant book ,and goes into great detail ,especially with the diaries of those who suffered . About a people who went to new lands in the hope of making a new and fresh start . But with a lack of farming knowledge of the area ,,some greed , ending up in a man made disaster .Native American Indians who had been thrown off their lands ,after another broken treaty ,had managed this land for thousands of years ,and knew the weather and natural cycles and were able to adapt .The knew breed of farmer was doomed ,once the first sod was turned over ,and on top of this greed set in with a lot of them ,when the Government encouraged them to grow as much grain as possible during the first world war . When things went belly up ,after borrowing from banks for machinery ,cars, houses, etc, disaster followed with the Dust Bowl of the 30's .People couldn't pay back ,,banks collapsed all over the area ,and evictions . It seems we still haven't learnt from the past ,with banks collapsing and evictions all over and no respect for nature . A book ,very well written ,with food for thought ..

A fairly enjoyable book. I was interested in the era and learning more about The Dust Bowl, and "The Worst Hard Time" gave me an interesting, if not redundant glimpse into the day to day life of homesteaders in the Panhandle.The conditions and circumstances of the people in the Panhandle during the 30s are pretty grim and Timothy Egan doesn't shy away from that. Usually I am not too bothered by a depressing read, but this one was non-stop. When you thought things couldn't get worse - they always did.Overall, I enjoyed the characters and content of the book more than the authors writing style. I found Egan repetitive and heavy handed in spots, though he can tell a story quite well.

In this story of the great Dust Bowl that hit the midwest in the 1930s, Timothy Egan follows the lives of a few families as they cope with this unprecedented weather situation. Unfortunately, he doesn't follow through on all of them, so with some families, we're left wondering what became of them. But his descriptions are amazing and it becomes very clear that this is not just a lot of dust that made it hard to grow anything. The problem was far greater. The dust was so thick that people actually choked and died from it. Many came down with dust pneumonia with fatal results. The static electricity could knock a man over and the spiders that came with were of biblical proportions.Eagan also spends a fair share of the book determining how this great tragedy came about. Droughts had always been a natural part of this area in America, but nothing like the dust had ever been seen before. The conclusion: Man himself created this phenomenon by farming the land at such a rate that it was impossible for it to recover. Even to this day, parts of it haven't. But whatever recovery has been made, we can thank FDR and his renewal concepts through the New Deal.It's a fascinating book and I would highly recommend it.