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The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Paperback – September 1, 2006
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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.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2006
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100618773479
- ISBN-13978-0618773473
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American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster.Highlighted by 1,044 Kindle readers
Yet most people living in the center of the Dust Bowl, about two thirds of the population in 1930, never left during that hard decade.Highlighted by 926 Kindle readers
Editorial Reviews
Review
[A] fierce, humane account of the dreams and extremes that crashed head on during the nearly decade-long calamity of the Dust Bowl. The New York Times
[A] vivid and gritty piece of forgotten history.
USA Today
"The Worst Hard Time" provides a sobering, gripping account of a disaster whose wounds are still not fully healed today.
Boston Globe
The Worst Hard Time is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction.
The Baltimore Sun
Egan has admirably captured a part of our American experience that should not be forgotten.
The San Francisco Chronicle
Egan is a passionate and accomplished writer...Read this for history, not inspiration or entertainment.
The Denver Post
Egan's account of the Dust Bowl era is a final, terrible rebuke to the policies of America's dying days of frontier expansion.
The Seattle Times
THE WORST HARD TIME is a flat-out masterpiece of historical reportage.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer —
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (September 1, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0618773479
- ISBN-13 : 978-0618773473
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Item Weight : 10.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.89 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #10,336 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #70 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of ten books, including the forthcoming, A FEVER IN THE HEARTLAND, which will be released on April 4. His book on the Dust Bowl, THE WORST HARD TIME, won a National Book Award for nonfiction. His book on photographer Edward Curtis, SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER, was awarded the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. He's also written several New York Times' bestsellers, including THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN and THE BIG BURN. He's a third-generation Westerner.
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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.
by Timothy Egan
Review by Carolyn B. Leonard
The "Worst Hard Time" is subtitled,
The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
... and there are a lot of memories told about the horrible dust storms but that is not what I remember about the book. The website "Goodreads" claims this book has 1849 reviews and 9444 ratings. Egan, a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times, on this book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in history/biography.
The author dedicated the book to his dad "who had been raised by his widowed mother during the darkest years of the Great Depression, four to a bedroom."
The Chicago Tribune said this book, "Masterfully captures the story of our nation's greatest environmental disaster."
The New York Times book review noted "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."
Seattle Times (winner of eight Pulitzer prizes) remarked: "After reading Timothy Egan's new book, "The Worst Hard Time," one could make a case that the Joads made the best of the situation. "The Worst Hard Time" is about the disaster that befell those who were left behind.
AND YET I remembered none of those things after reading the book. I had heard the dustbowl stories from my parents, who lived through that time. I had seen the photos of the sad faces, terrible times. I knew a few of those people and many of their descendants. But I never think of those stories when I remember the book.
What I remember is the stoutheartedness of the Germans from Russia who settled around Dalhart, Texas, and on up into the edges of the panhandle in Oklahoma where I grew up. No one else mentioned it. I pulled the book back out to see if I was confused about that subject.
Finally I found what I was looking for. Chapter 4, High Plains Deutch. From Page 60 to 72; only twelve pages, but for me this is the heart of the book. George Albert Ehrlich would tell his nine children around the table about the bad years on the Volga River in Russia in the village of Tcherbagovka. He spoke in a very old style of German with a sprinkling of Russian, spiced with the dialect of Texas-Oklahoma. He told them about being chained to horses in barns to deter horse thieves. Through an improbable journey of 166 years, these people had bounced from southern Germany to the Volga River region of Russia to the Cherokee Outlet of Oklahoma.
The Russlanddeutschen were not Russian nor were they fully German. Hardened by long exile, state cruelty, and official ridicule, they wanted only to be left alone. In those twelve pages you find the reason why those German families, mostly Mennonites from around the Black Sea, Conscientious Objectors by religion, excellent farmers who were opposed to war in a country where their countrymen coould and did kill without flinching. Catherine the Great offered them a manifesto of homestead land in Russia, tax breaks, cultural freedom and NO military conscription. The Russlanddeutschen went, but they held on to their religion, their food, their dress, their language, their family stories, and their seeds of grain, When that promise was broken many years later, Russlanddeutschen families closed up their villages in Russia and fled to America.
This is their story, how they came all that way from Germany to Russia to America, bringing their heritage with them. I remember their food best of all, when the Lutheran church ladies (mostly of the Germans from Russia families) served food. The Bierox, my favorite, a sort of meat pie with cabbage - delicious! and how they brought us the hard, red winter wheat that could survive our western plains extremes of weather, they sowed the seeds into the hems of their clothing. But they accidentally brought also the Russian thistles or tumbleweeds that blow across the land.
Egan introduces us to the stoic, long-suffering men and women. He takes us into the lives of families in places like Dalhart, Texas, and Boise City, Oklahoma, the latter being almost smack in the center of what was known as "No Man's Land," the Oklahoma panhandle.
Read those twelve pages. If you never read more you will have gained an education in being stouthearted like the Germans from Russia.
Top reviews from other countries
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.
It is worth noting that this is the book upon which Ken Burns' documentary Ken Burns - The Dust Bowl [Region 2 UK Version] [DVD ] is based. If you are planning to watch the DVD too, it's worth reading the book first and treat the DVD as a companion to it rather than the other way around. Otherwise your reading experience will be somewhat spoiled by knowing in advance the fate of those people, who survived, who left, who made it, who gave up. `The Worst Hard Time' isn't a novel, but it certainly makes you care for its protagonists.
It's hard to believe that the Dust Bowl was one of the biggest man-made environmental catastrophes of modern times; and it's even harder to believe that it's no longer talked about. This book should be a compulsory reading for all politicians who still consider the earth's resources as a commodity to be plundered and exploited in the name of human greed.










