The Worst Hard Time

I’d always assumed that the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a natural disaster. Nope. The scouring dust storms that destroyed thousands of lives and millions of farms in five states didn’t have to happen. They were the predictable—and predicted!—result of short-sighted human decisions, such as the government handing tracts of formerly Indian land to white settlers to tear out the nourishing native grasses and plant wheat instead.

The human hand behind extreme weather might seem obvious to us now, but it was eye-opening for me in 2006 when I read this riveting nonfiction drama of families trapped in a… show more.

When this book was published in 2006, I immediately bought a copy. I was researching my own family’s history at the time—families who had lived in Oklahoma and Kansas during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

In the “Dirty Thirties,” enormous, constant dust storms swirled through the air across multiple states. Cattle died, crops failed, and people choked. One of my relatives, suffering from severe pneumonia caused by the dust, left Kansas with her parents when she was just 10 years old. Her doctor had told her parents to get her out of there or prepare for a funeral.

Egan’s… show more.

This nonfiction book is jam-packed with astonishing facts and captivating personalities from the time of the Dust Bowl.

The disasters were many and varied during the 1930s on America’s Great Plains. “The weather might display seven different moods in a year, and six of them were life-threatening. Droughts, blizzards, grass fires, hailstorms, flash floods, and tornadoes…”

Not to mention the dust storms: “thick like coarse animal hair…with an edge like steel wool.” At least two monster “black dusters” traveled 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers), taking topsoil from the midwest all the way to Washington DC.

The impact on society was terrible,… show more.

Depression-era Dust Bowl storms and economic calamity are the villains of Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time, which won the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction. Cattle go blind and choke on swirling sand. Lives turn so relentlessly bleak, distraught parents give away their children. Egan superbly documents the many miseries in Oklahoma and the strength of character needed to endure, but that state may not have gotten the worst of it. I wrote a book about an integrated baseball team that played in Bismarck, North Dakota during those grim days. So many inhabitants fled, it wasn’t until 2011… show more.

In heartbreaking, haunting detail, the author describes the experiences of individuals, families, and communities as they endured “the worst hard time” of the Dust Bowl. What struck me most about those interviewed is not just how much they were able to remember decades later, but the ongoing raw and painful emotions generated when they recounted their stories. Put all of this alongside the author’s meticulous research and analysis of the social, economic, political, and geographical forces of the time, and you have an incredibly moving story fully grounded in historical accuracy.

I love Timothy Egan’s book for its clear-eyed and deeply compassionate look into the Dirty Thirties. Egan tells the stories of the people who survived the Dust Bowl: mothers sweeping the house with a shovel; fathers trying to rescue their livestock from the smothering soil drifts; children with dust pneumonia. This is a book about the way human greed and recklessness destroyed an abundant nature—a lesson for the climate changes we are facing. Favorite quote: “For all the horror, the land was not without its magic... the sky was open and embracing, the breeze only a soft whisper... Robin's egg… show more.