[OTM]⇒ Download The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Timothy Egan 9780618773473 Books

The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Timothy Egan 9780618773473 Books

Download As PDF : The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Timothy Egan 9780618773473 Books

The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Timothy Egan 9780618773473 Books

I was born in 1935 and lived in southern Kansas until 1955. I remember some of the dust storms as if it was yesterday. I recently read my mother's 1935 diary and she frequently mentioned the terrible dust storms. I was very young during the Great Depression, but I still remember Mills, which were ten to equal one penny. I was listening to the radio when Franklin D. Rosevelt announced the attack on Pearl Harbor and December 7th, 1941 as a day that will live in infamy. My grandparents lived on a farm in northern Oklahoma. To visit there was a trip into the past. They had no electricity, no running water, an out house, kerosene lanterns, kerosene stoves, and a real ice box. They are all gone now and I can no longer ask what the conditions were in their early years. This book helped me see into the past of my own relatives.


Tags : The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl [Timothy Egan] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV>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,Timothy Egan,The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl,Mariner Books,0618773479,United States - 20th Century,20th century,Droughts,Dust Bowl Era, 1931-1939,Dust storms,Great Plains,History,History - U.S.,History United States 20th Century,History: American,Natural Disasters,U.S. History - Depression And New Deal (1929-1938),United States - 20th CenturyDepression,United States - State & Local - Midwest

The Worst Hard Time The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Timothy Egan 9780618773473 Books Reviews

As someone who's lived on the East Coast my whole life, a continuous forest with ideal farmland, I took for granted the hardship that settlers faced as they moved out West and decided to settle. However, it was also baffling how incompetent the government was in not only supporting the destruction of natural habitats without repercussions, but also the sheer idiocy they fell back in in dealing with the situation.

Timothy Egan's dive into the Great Dust Bowl is superb. His precise, narrative writing does much to draw the reader in and make its real-life characters easier to relate to. He gives personalities to these people who refused to bow down to nature and for that they were punished, in a way. But punished not only by the land, but also by their own government. Egan details the slow spiral of the Great Plains from lush prairie land to desiccated, desolate hardpan without a hint of green. He compliments the personal narratives of these farmers with in-depth historical analysis of the towns and the governments working behind the scenes, while also providing a sort of biological analysis of the ecosystem and how it rapidly fell apart.
An amazingly powerful book about the 1930s dust bowl, how we got it, and what was done about it (often, very little). In my opinion it excels over earlier works because it gives causes for the phenomenon that plagued the Central States for years over and above the usual "dry weather and strong winds." I won't deny the book has its more pedantic aspects when it gets into climatology and such, but otherwise it's so good I would recommend it for high-school history courses -- the advanced ones, anyway. The paperback has been sharply reduced in price at and other vendors.
This book is so amazingly timely, not just for the aspect of the man-made contributions to natural disaster happening at a time of economic hardship, but also for a lot of the political aspects of it, and of course for the human aspects. People don't change so much.

I did watch the Dust Bowl miniseries first, and they do cover some of the same ground, though with different focuses, but I feel like you get more details from this book.

To be fair, it is rough. There are a few main people that you follow and they are constantly defeated by the land, dying broke, or physically broken, and any chances for renewal and success have to wait for the next generation. Even as things get better, there are indications that we are on the same path, not just in other places, but even right there with the demands on the Oglalla.

That's why it is so timely, and so important. Humans don't change much, and they will keep making the same mistakes over and over again unless information, and education, can change that.
I don't normally pay much attention to the title of a book. The title's primary purpose to me is to catch my attention when I'm in a book store browsing. After it catches my eye I immediately resort to the GR scan feature to learn what GR members have to say about the book. In the final analysis what I remember about a book is what's behind the title. Frequently, when speaking about a book I've read with a friend I will be completely unable to recall the title. This book and its title are entirely different. I can't recall a more appropriately titled book than this one, "The Worst Hard Time".

My parents were children of the of the Depression. During my childhood they told us stories of how that national tragedy affected their childhoods and that of their friends and neighbors. We all probably have read stories and seen photos of the Depression and many of us have read "The Grapes of Wrath" or seen the movie. This book is not about any of that. This book is not about the people that fled the Dust Bowl. This book is about the people that stayed and attempted to exist on next to nothing, literally. Pride and independence prevented them from seeking aid until things went beyond desperate, way beyond. What is also remarkable about this book is to read it now in a time when we live among people that for selfish and political reasons are adamant in their rejection of science and in climate change. The book makes clear that after the government finally addressed the crisis following FDR's election that the cause of the Dust Bowl was man and his ignorance and his greed. Sadly, the people that need to read this history never will as it fails to affirm what they wish to believe and profit by. What this book does affirm is the consequences of man's ignorance and greed when dealing with the forces of nature. To this day the area afflicted by these vices of man has not healed.

The author's story spans primarily the '30's but he delivers a necessary background to set up his story and the lives of those he uses to illustrate the scope of the Dust Bowl tragedy. In his telling of this history he employs the lives of several local residents in and around the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. The stories of these people really humanizes the narrative and magnifies its impact. While weather reports, crops statistics, land cultivation data etc are all helpful and put a scale on the disaster it's reading about the daily lives of people that lived through it that give this book its wow factor. The impact this disaster had on the health of the people living there was something that I never considered. I always thought the limit of the tragedy was in the fertility of the soil blowing away. I did not know that these winds were an almost daily occurrence and that breathable air was a precious commodity and "dust pneumonia" was a virulent killer. Who would ever think a person walking or working outside could be suddenly caught in one of these dust storms and suffocate to death. That the detrimental affect of the Dust Bowl on the health of residents was something that would have required a career of coal mining yet these folks were being afflicted within a few years. This is an extremely compelling history whose worth today is enormous and we should all learn about the Worst Hard Time. I highly recommend this book. (less)
I was born in 1935 and lived in southern Kansas until 1955. I remember some of the dust storms as if it was yesterday. I recently read my mother's 1935 diary and she frequently mentioned the terrible dust storms. I was very young during the Great Depression, but I still remember Mills, which were ten to equal one penny. I was listening to the radio when Franklin D. Rosevelt announced the attack on Pearl Harbor and December 7th, 1941 as a day that will live in infamy. My grandparents lived on a farm in northern Oklahoma. To visit there was a trip into the past. They had no electricity, no running water, an out house, kerosene lanterns, kerosene stoves, and a real ice box. They are all gone now and I can no longer ask what the conditions were in their early years. This book helped me see into the past of my own relatives.