The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan, read by Patrick G. Lawlor
Reviewed by: Sarah Baker, Circulation Assistant
Genre: Nonfiction
Suggested Age: Adults
What is the book about?: The southern plains of the American southwest was once covered in bison, with herds of up to three million animals. After the government claimed it from the Native Americans and condoned the slaughter of bison herds, it worked hard at selling it as the last frontier and the best place to homestead. Land speculation and hopes of striking it rich in either ranching, oil, or farming to led to questionable practices in land maintenance. Egan focuses his story on a four-county area that spans Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico, with a sharper focus on Dalhart, Texas and Boise City, Oklahoma (pronounced boy-say). He focuses in particular on six families and their struggles to make a life in tough country made worse by the raging dust storms of 1935.
My Review: Reading history is painful, and American history is often harder since it’s closer to home. The attempted eradication of the Native population, the wholesale slaughter of the bison herds, the thinly-veiled bigotry against anyone who wasn’t of pure “Anglo-Saxon” descent (which targeted Jews and a large settlement of Russian-Germans) and the outright bigotry against Mexicans and blacks…sometimes, it makes for hard reading. But it’s a part of our past we have to face. Realizing that so much of this settlement took place just over a hundred years ago is startling. We often think of homesteaders and sod houses as something from the earlier 1800s, but much of the settling of the southern plains happened after 1901.
Egan lays out the history, starting with the removal of the Comanche and the bison herds up through the 1930s. Having the advantage of hindsight, we see risky and outright stupid farming practices, each another nail in the coffin of the southern plains. The failing of farms, the illnesses caused by the dust storms, the destruction of property caused by winds like sandpaper…and the human stories that go with it. The hardest ones to hear were the stories of the very young and very old coming down with Dust Pneumonia, a disease that left scars in its survivors lungs for the rest of their lives. But he also shows the birth of conservation, of trying to undo the harm and to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, the kindness in peoples’ hearts as they look out for each other in bleak days, and that hardest to kill emotion – hope.
Three Words That Describe This Book: Informative, Heart-wrenching, Uplifting
Give This a Try if You Like… The Grapes of Wrath, American history, tales of underdogsI
Rating: 4/5
About FDL Reads
FDL Reads is a series of weekly book reviews from Fondulac District Library.
