Customer Reviews

Black Sunday: The Great Dust Storm of April 14, 1935

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"Black Sunday" was a fascinating study of a dust storm of mythic proportions. I enjoyed reading the recollections of the storm from many of the people who experienced it. As I have never lived in the prairie states, I had no idea these "dusters" even existed.

Only those who lived in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s can testify to the incredible spectacle of the huge dust storms that swept through the region. These so-called 'Black Blizzards' were huge creatures of nature, blotting out the sun sometime for hours at a time and sending dust/dirt through every opening in a house or building. One of the largest blizzards occurred on 14 April 1935, rampaging through Kansas and Texas. BLACK SUNDAY tells the story of that storm.

BLACK SUNDAY is basically a collection of 200+ oral histories of Texas and Kansas citizens that lived through Black Sunday. Most accounts are fairly short; a few run to two pages. In these accounts, men, women and children tell the tale of a huge, dark dust cloud rolling across the Plains, a cloud that soon swept up their house, farm or town and reduced visibility to zero. The sun was blotted out and day became night. People caught outside struggled to find their homes or even the road they were supposed to be driving on! Many of the Plains houses were in poor shape and the swirling, high-powered dirt/dust soon poured through every crack and left the interiors covered in fine dirt. It was an incredible experience to live through...and to read about. BLACK SUNDAY has some amazing accounts in it; I found it fascinating. The book also includes about two dozen photographs showing the on-coming dust storm; great stuff!

As much as I was fascinated by the accounts found in BLACK SUNDAY, I wish Stallings had tried to organize all the different accounts into some sort of chronological/geographical arrangement. As it is, he divides the reminiscences into memories of women & children, then men followed by newspaper accounts from April 1935, newspaper accounts from later years, miscellaneous material (poems, songs, etc.) and so on. The story would have been more effectively told if there had been some sort of combined narrative rather than running one block of tales after another.

Having said that, BLACK SUNDAY offers a you-are-there view of one of the rarest natural phenomenons around. The Dust Bowl was pillored by such Black Blizzards throughout the '30 and, thanks to Frank Stallings, modern readers can now share in the experience. Recommended.