Summary
The Worst Hard Time is Timothy Egan's National Book Award winning account of the Dust Bowl as told from the perspectives of those who lived through it. Egan traces the origins of the "nation's worst prolonged environmental disaster" -- from the theft of the land from the Comanche, to government efforts to populate the land after the expulsion of Indians and bison, to the destruction of the grasslands as they were plowed over to be planted with wheat. In the early 2000s, Egan conducted interviews with people then in their eighties and nineties who had lived through the Dust Bowl that ravaged many parts of the High Plains in the states of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. He tells the stories of these people who, unlike the Joad family in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, chose to stay. The accounts are dramatic and a testament to the power of the human spirit -- and hubris.
Critical Evaluation
Egan masterfully weaves together dates, newspaper clippings, speeches, crop records, telegrams, photographs from as far back as the 1860s, maps and descriptions of place past and present, along with the human stories of the dust that ravaged many a family farm, took lives, and led to countless acts of desperation. He brings the physical experience of the dust to life with vivid descriptions: “On the skin, the dust was like a nail file, a grit strong enough to hurt. People rubbed Vaseline in their nostrils as a filter” (7). His interviews and research cover a wide range of perspectives on those years, from those like John McCarty who were boosters of the area and refused to give up on their prairie towns to those who wanted to give up their children for fear that they would starve. He tells of an old woman whose misery was so deep that she burned her husband’s journal accounts of those years. Who would ever want to relive the “horror” of those years? (3). His use of primary sources, particularly the human stories, bring this history of grinding poverty, environmental calamity, and determination to life and make it hard to put this book down.
Reader’s Annotation
Read The Grapes of Wrath and want to learn more about the Dust Bowl? If you are a lover of history (and geography) who looks for the human angle within the data, this is a perfect read for you.
Information about the Author
“According to Gale’s Contemporary Authors Online, “Timothy Egan is an American journalist. Born in Seattle, Washington, on November 8, 1954, he graduated from the University of Washington in 1980. Egan began working as the Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times in 1987, eventually becoming the Seattle bureau chief.”
...
“Egan returned to nonfiction with The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. To write the book, Egan began collecting oral histories from survivors in 2002, traveling the back roads and visiting family farms. He profiles many of the survivors and their families and recounts those difficult times also written about by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. However, unlike Steinbeck, who wrote about those who fled to California and other places, Egan focuses on the farmers and families who hunkered down and weathered the drought.”
Genre
Non-fiction/ History
Curriculum Ties
History--Dust Bowl
Booktalking Ideas
Show Dorothea Lange photographs, and explain that this was a time in which the sky sometimes went black in the afternoon and dust would come through the windows of peoples’ homes. This is a history that tells some of the personal stories from this time and place.
Reading Level/ Interest Level
Age 14+
Challenge Issues
N/A
Why Included?
I wanted to include a book in the collection for some of the history buffs out there. This is one of the most gripping historical accounts I’ve read in years and wanted young people to know about this particular book and Timothy Egan as an author.
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