Customer Reviews
A masterpiece - By: Thomas Paul, 05 Oct 2007 
Through the 1920's, a farmer on the Great Plains could easily make a fortune compared to a factory worker in the city. Everything changed in the 30's for not only did the 30's bring The Great Depression it also brought drought. With the Depression, crop prices plummeted. With no flow of money there was no market to sell wheat. Farmers found that the money they could get for their wheat, when they could find a buyer, was not enough to pay the cost of growing the wheat. As their savings disappeared in failing banks & mortgages came due, the rain stopped. In the long term drought is common on the Plains but farmers had been fooled by fifteen years of wet weather. The crops died, the animals died, & the winds came.
Without the native grasses to hold the dried, cracked soil to the ground the dust storms started. It became the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history. The Great Plains turned into a desert of deadly dust storms. The movie "The Grapes of Wrath" tells the story of one fictional family that fled the dust storms. The book, "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan tells the story of those who stayed. Egan traveled through the Plains interviewing those who lived through the Dust Bowl era & their stories as told by Egan are unforgettable. This is the story of Ike Osteen who grew up in a dugout on the prairie & lived through hundreds of dust storms. This is the story of Jeanne Clark whose lungs were scarred from the dust pneumonia that nearly killed her when she was just a child. This is the story of Melt White whose father was a cowboy on one of the largest ranches in the world & watched the Plains turn to dust. This is story of families who stayed in the Dust Bowl simply because they were too poor to go anywhere else & refused to believe that next year would be as bad as this year.
The Worst Hard Time is not simply a history but rather a recording of the memories of those who endured the unendurable. The diary of Don Hartwell, widely quoted in the book, tells the story: August 31, 1937 - "Practicallly alll the corn in this country... has been destroyed by hot winds & drouth. This makes the 4th total failure in succession." July 24, 1938 - "Today is just common hell, death, & destruction to every living thing." August 5, 1939 - "Nearly everything is destroyed." Each page of this book carries the suffering of those who lived through the Dust Bowl. This is a book that reads more like a novel than a history. The characters in the story truly come alive because they are real & Egan is a skilled writer who can make their stories highly readable. This is a book that you simply can't put down. It is a masterpiece.
