Normally, I give a review after finishing a book. This time, like Fred, I will give periodic thoughts and quotes as I am reading it. The book is The Worst Hard Time, by Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times contributor and author Timothy Egan. He won a National Book Award for this historical account of those who lived through the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains during the Depression.
“Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems. An hour goes by on the same straight line and then up pops a town on a map…” (pg. 2).
“... how the greatest grassland in the world was turned inside out, how the crust blew away, raged up in the sky and showered down a suffocating blackness off and on for most of a decade… it seemed on many days as if a curtain were being drawn across a vast stage at world’s end.”
The Dust Bowl occurred during the Depression, when one of four adults had no job.
How the Dust Bowl happened: Rain disappeared. There was no sod to keep the earth in place, so the soil calcified and started blowing. Dust clouds formed and rolled like moving mountains. When the dust fell, it penetrated everything. “The eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away… Chickens roosted in midafternoon” (pg. 5).
Ike Osteen, who survived the flu epidemic of 1918, the Depression, and two world wars, said the Dust Bowl was worse than it all.
The worst day during the Dust Bowl was April 14, 1935, in which twice as much dirt was whirled about than was used to create the Panama Canal. "The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted a single afternoon" (pg. 8).
Look for more posts about this book in the days ahead.
1 comment:
Good book.
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