Discussion Question - Worst Hard Times

1. Do you see any parallels between the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster of our time?

2. Beyond the hurricane, what is the relevance of the Dust Bowl to our times?

3. The story is of survival, perseverance, and poverty.  The sky would turn black at noon, no electricity, starvation.  Despite the hardships, were there any good times in the book?

4. What kind of peril did the Dust Bowlers face?

5. What were the causes of the Dust Bowl?

6. Was the land and weather any different in 1935 than when it was farmed than it had been for years and years before? So what changed?

7. Do you think the people who farmed the southern plains brought the disaster on themselves?

8. Discuss some of the characters in the story.  The part-Apache cowboy family, Hazel Lucas, Big Hugh Bennett,  the Herzsteins, John McCarty the newspaper man, what were their lives like?

9. There was a free-spirited kid, one of nine children living in a hole in the ground, whose only goal was to make it to his senior year in high school.  What do you think was in his future?

10. People do some strange things during the worst years. What were some of the strange things they did.


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