A friend of mine asked if I'd be willing to write up a few customer reviews for the bookshop she works at and I said I would. And how I'm sharing my first review with the entire interweb!
The Worst Hard Time:The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowlby Timothy Egan(He lives in Seattle by and by)In school I can only remember the Dust Bowl being mentioned in maybe a single line in an entire section of The Great Depression in our history textbooks. So my knowledge of the Dust Bowl itself had always been limited to Steinbeck's almost romantisized version of events and Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads. So when I bought this book I tucked into it right away. What I discovered from the very first page was that I was going to learn about our greatest enviromental disaster from every possible aspect. This book is loaded with facts and countered with firsthand accounts from the people that lived through this nightmare. This book is a testement about what happens when we mess with nature. Did we learn from this? As a collective, perhaps not. I don't think I have the proper words to really give you an idea of what this experiance was like for these people. So I'm going to share a conversation that a farmer named Bam White had with his son after witnessing their first dust storm (or "duster" as they became known as):What is that? Melt White asked his daddy.It's the earth itself, Bam said. The earth is on the move.Why?Look what we done to the grass, he said. Look at the land: wrong side up.It seems that to this day our way of thinking
about and caring for the environment has remained wrong side up itself.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress. If you go to their site you'll find thousands of photos taken during the Dust Bowl.
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