The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Paperback)
by Timothy Egan (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds. (Dec. 14)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker
On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Timothy Egan's searing history of the economic and ecological collapse of the southern Great Plains during the 1930s is an epic cautionary tale. Intertwining the stories of roughly a dozen individuals and families with a grim overview of the region-wide disaster, Egan's fluent narrative chronicles the terrifying consequences of a reckless hubris that in a few decades stripped the earth of prairie grass that for centuries had protected it from erosion. The American people and their government collaborated in transforming a sea of waving, waist-high bluestem -- described by William Clark on his expedition west with Meriwether Lewis in 1804 as "one of the most pleasing prospects I ever beheld" -- into a blasted landscape of abandoned farms surrounded by four-foot drifts of dust, scattered with dead farm animals and useless equipment.

They should have known better. In 1820, the explorer Stephen Long judged the plains "almost wholly uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture." Late-19th-century speculators tried establishing huge commercial ranches, but droughts and winter freezes killed so many cattle that they couldn't turn a reliable profit. Investors split up million-acre spreads into small parcels and advertised nationwide. Would-be farmers arrived en masse in the 1910s and '20s, buying windmills to pump water from the Ogallala Aquifer and tractors with plows to turn grassland into farmland on millions of acres in western Kansas, southeast Colorado, eastern New Mexico and the Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle.

The local cowboys, whose work on the ranches had taught them what was sustainable, were appalled. "If they continued to break up the grass in such a fury the land would be no good to anyone," these men warned the homesteaders. But the sodbusters kept busting sod -- encouraged, a 1936 U.S. government report concluded, by "mistaken public policies . . . a mistaken homesteading policy, the stimulation of war time demands which led to over cropping and over grazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous."

The resulting catastrophe arrived in stages. Wheat prices collapsed right before the stock market crashed in 1929. An eight-year drought began in 1931; annual rainfall eventually dropped below 10 inches (20 was the bare minimum for farming without irrigation). On Jan. 21, 1932, "a cloud ten thousand feet high from ground to top appeared just outside Amarillo." Stripped of grass, desiccated by drought, the ruined topsoil simply flew away in the high winds that for millennia had blown across the plains. Now they scoured it, carrying poisonous clouds hundreds of miles and dumping black grit onto streets, into homes and deep inside people's lungs. The U.S. Weather Bureau didn't yet have a name for this new weather phenomenon, but by 1933, when 70 of them stalked the Panhandle, they were called dust storms.

Egan, a New York Times reporter, offers dramatic descriptions of the storms that vividly recreate their apocalyptic fury. He really excels, however, in capturing the human suffering they inflicted: Hazel Lucas Shaw's infant daughter and grandmother dying of "dust pneumonia" on the same day; Gustav Borth hiding behind his shed so his family would not see him weeping over the debts he could not pay; Caroline Henderson dreaming of rain but waking to "another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred." Egan also paints an unforgettable picture of a society in "terminal disorder": banks closed, stores bankrupt, people bartering eggs for shoes, hospitals that could not be reached on roads impassable with dust. In 1935, the year that Associated Press reporter Bob Geiger attached the phrase "Dust Bowl" to this desolate region, 850 million tons of topsoil blew off the plains. One hundred million acres were badly eroded; nearly half were "essentially destroyed." A quarter of a million people fled the Dust Bowl during the 1930s.

But most residents stayed, anchored by an indomitable attachment to their blighted homeland that provides Egan's frightening account with one of its two rays of hope. The other comes from the improvised, heroic efforts by New Deal officials to implement policies that would alleviate the crisis and prevent its recurrence. Preeminent here is Hugh Bennett, head of FDR's Soil Conservation Service, whose visionary efforts to restore the prairie and encourage farmers to "think beyond their fence lines" led to the three national grasslands that the Forest Service today maintains in the region. On the other hand, Egan points out in his epilogue, federal subsidies intended to help families stay on the land have become "a payoff to corporate farms growing crops that are already in oversupply" -- and watering them with water pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer "eight times faster than nature can refill it."

Will we ever learn? Egan draws no final conclusions, letting readers judge for themselves from the wealth of admonitory facts and evocative details skillfully assembled in this sobering, heart-wrenching book.

Reviewed by Wendy Smith
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine
A national correspondent on environmental issues for the New York Times, Timothy Egan describes a central plain that is as distinct and varied as the Rocky Mountains that buttress it to the west. "Linguistic flourishes" (San Francisco Chronicle) and an "authoritative voice" (Portland Oregonian), supported by Egan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning reportorial skills, make The Worst Hard Time an essential testament-cum-elegy to the price of human progress and the indomitable will of the American spirit. Reviewers are loath to throw around "masterpiece" lightly, but Egan’s book gets a couple of nods; the uniformity of the praise seems to affirm his heady accomplishment.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile
The best history books thrill us by telling their story as if the outcome were not assured. This is one of those books. Convincingly read by Patrick Lawlor, Egan's book renders the environmental ravages and human drama of the 1930s' Dust Bowl in fascinating detail. Egan blends a myriad of individual stories with the political record to create a tale of greed, stupidity, heroism, and perseverance that keeps one from touching the stop button. Lawlor's somewhat nasal voice sounds right for the era, and he reads the straight history passages with energy and clarity. He also imbues the many individual voices, including those who appear but once, with enlightening character. This is a must-listen. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From Booklist
Following the fortunes of representative settlers of the southern Great Plains, Egan's narrative of the dust bowl during the Depression begins with the seeds of environmental disaster. The area was the last tract of the continental U.S. to be homesteaded, the last episode of open-land real-estate showmanship that enticed people to start over. "Settlement was a dare," writes Egan, a dare of plowing rain-sparse, blustery grassland. And briefly, around World War I's inflated grain prices, the dare paid off: towns materialized on the horizon, homesteaders such as Bam White moved in, cheered on by boosters like John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart Texan. "Every man a landlord" was the slogan of the era, a banner of optimism that eroded into despair due to dust storms of relentlessly increasing ferocity. In vivid fashion, Egan reports on the grit, the drifts, and the figures bent against the gusts. All the elements of the iconic dust bowl photographs come together in the author's evocative portrait of those who first prospered and then suffered during the 1930s drought. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan's critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, "the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, "The Worst Hard Time" is "arguably the best nonfiction book yet" (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of trifling with nature.

About the Author
Tim Egan is the author and illustrator of several offbeat and humorous tales for children. He is consistently recognized for his individuality and delightful illustrations. His first book for children, Friday Night at Hodges' Cafe (1994), was recognized by Publishers Weekly in their Flying Starts issue, and Booklist proclaimed him "'one of the most interesting author-illustrators around, always trying something new and quirky."' Born in New Jersey, Tim Egan moved to California to attend the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He still lives in southern California with his wife, Ann, and their two sons. When he is not writing and illustrating books, he works as an art director and designer.