The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl [Paperback]

Timothy Egan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2006

The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since.
Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect” (New York Times).

In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds. (Dec. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

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.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1St Edition edition (September 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618773479
• ISBN-13: 978-0618773473
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (327 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,563 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of five books, most recently The Worst Hard Time, which won a National Book Award for nonfiction and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. He writes a weekly column, "Outposts," for the New York Times.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

229 of 242 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MY BEST READ OF 2005, December 18, 2005

By 

D. Blankenship (The Ozarks) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Hardcover)

Beyond a doubt, this was the best of the books I read during this past year. Having had many family members who were caught up in this, one of the worst natural (actually it seems it was more man made than natural) disasters to strike our country, made this work of even more interest to me. Mr. Eagan has not only given us a wonderful account of this era in our nations history, he has made it come alive through his exceptional story telling abilities. This is not a dry (no pun intended), academic history of the great depression. Rather it is a history of a group of people who lived through the worst of it, the great dust bowl at the center of our country. These are real people and the author treats them as such. Very few meaningless statistics mar the story line, few government reports are offered or cited to reduce the human suffering to neatly typed pieces of paper. As you read this book, you come to realize that these people are just like you and me. You read and ponder "what if?" The book is quite readable, quite informative and one that I will no doubt give a reread to in the near future. Recommend this one highly!

98 of 101 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The horror...the horror, April 23, 2007

By 

Richard E. Hourula (Berkeley, CA. United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Paperback)

Absolutely totally bleak. Depressing. Tragic. American experiences in the horrific Dust Bowl of the 1930's as related in "Worst Hard Times" was all of this and more. Yet in the hands of author Timothy Egan the story is compelling and an absolute must read for anyone interested in the Thirties, the Depression or, of course, the Dust Bowl.
The statistics are here as are thorough accounts of the incredible dust storms that devastated a land an its people. Egan puts names to many of those who survived and faces to the names. Here is the success of "The Worst Hard Times," putting the devastating impact of the ecological disaster in human terms.
Meets those who were there. Some still alive today to tell the tale. A tale of abject poverty caused or agitated by Mother Nature reminding us who the mortals are and what fools they often be. For part of the problem was man-made as newcomers to the lands farmed soil that was ideal for ranching, with devastating results. With drought, heat waves and wind the loose soil was soon part of mighty clouds dumping dust everywhere. Into homes, eyes and food and on a couple of occasions to eastern cities including the nation's capital and beyond.
I've read many stories of survival from shipwrecks to Arctic journeys to long marches to epic battles -- "Worst Hard Times" measures up to them all. The human capacity to endure can never be under estimated and it is never better told than in this book.
The heroes are those who persisted against all odds and a Federal Government under Franklin Roosevelt that did not hesitate to help.
There are eccentric interesting characters aplenty and individual stories to tug at the heart strings and to inspire. The landscape may have been bleak but the human spirit was rich and exciting.

121 of 127 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ecological Disaster Of The Great Depression, December 24, 2005

By 

C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Hardcover)

2005 has been a banner year for readable histories about natural disasters (see "A Crack in the World : America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906" by Simon Winchester) and natural disasters compounded by a series of catastrophic human errors (see "Curse of the Narrows : The Halifax Disaster of 1917" by Laura MacDonald). Mr Egan's history falls into the latter category with his story of the Dust Bowl during the Depression.

"The Worst Hard Time" traces the horrific consequences of poor farming practices in the Central Plain States during the drought of the 1930's. It is not a dry book about soil samples and weather charts but a living account of the human cost in fighting against tarantulas & seas of grasshoppers eating every plant in their path while struggling against the "duster" storms that blot out the sun. The reader can think of the Dust Bowl storms as the hurricanes of the Plain States. Illustrated with photographs of the poverty of that era, the reader will be shock and angry at the suffering of those farmers who attempted to ride out those storms.