| |
Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
|
List Price: $28.00
Our Price: $18.48
Your Save: $ 9.52 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 978.032
EAN: 9780618346974
ISBN: 061834697X
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2005-12-14
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Studio: Houghton Mifflin
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
"The Worst Hard Time is an epic story of blind hope and endurance almost beyond belief; it is also, as Tim Egan has told it, a riveting tale of bumptious charlatans, conmen, and tricksters, environmental arrogance and hubris, political chicanery, and a ruinous ignorance of nature's ways. Egan has reached across the generations and brought us the people who played out the drama in this devastated land, and uses their voices to tell the story as well as it could ever be told."
— Marq de Villiers, author of Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived—those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave—Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression.
As only great history can, Egan's book captures the very voice of the times: its grit, pathos, and abiding courage. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a lasting and important work of American history.
Timothy Egan is a national enterprise reporter for the New York Times. He is the author of four books and the recipient of several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
"As one who, as a young reporter, survived and reported on the great Dust Bowl disaster, I recommend this book as a dramatic, exciting, and accurate account of that incredible and deadly phenomenon. This is can't-put-it-down history." —Walter Cronkite
"The Worst Hard Time is wonderful: ribbed like surf, and battering us with a national epic that ranks second only to the Revolution and the Civil War. Egan knows this and convincingly claims recognition for his subject—as we as a country finally accomplished, first with Lewis and Clark, and then for 'the greatest generation,' many of whose members of course were also survivors of the hardships of the Great Depression. This is a banner, heartfelt but informative book, full of energy, research, and compassion." —Edward Hoagland, author of Compass Points: How I Lived
"Here's a terrific true story—who could put it down? Egan humanizes Dust Bowl history by telling the vivid stories of the families who stayed behind. One loves the people and admires Egan's vigor and sympathy." —Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
"The American West got lucky when Tim Egan focused his acute powers of observation on its past and present. Egan's remarkable combination of clear analysis and warm empathy anchors his portrait of the women and men who held on to their places—and held on to their souls—through the nearly unimaginable miseries of the Dust Bowl. This book provides the finest mental exercise for people wanting to deepen, broaden, and strengthen their thinking about the relationship of human beings to this earth." —Patricia N. Limerick, author of The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Worst Hard Time
Comment: Excellant. I heard about the "Dust Bowl" but never imagined what it really was and how terrible of time in our history. This book really opened my eyes. Hearing the stories from people that survived that time makes me fully appreciate how we have it today.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Non-fiction that Reads Like a Novel
Comment: What was the worst environmental disaster of the 20th century? Would you believe the over-farming of the southern Great Plains that led to the enormous dust storms of the 1930s? The biggest of these storms on April 14, 1935, which went down in history as "Black Sunday," completely blocked out the sun and contained more tons of dust and dirt than was removed to dig the Panama Canal. All of it airborne - clogging lungs, blinding cattle, burying homesteads, and turning the Great Plains into a lunar crater. Through diary accounts, personal interviews, and newspaper stories, Egan paints a vivid and personal picture of the people and places most affected by this ecological disaster. The book is fascinating - and penetrating. It's hard to imagine why so many people of Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska remained behind on what became a blistering hot patch of dirt. But they did. Egan's account is one of the best written historical novels, I've ever read. It's fast, it's detailed, and it packs an emotional kick. It's like stepping into a time capsule. The one weakness of the book, however, is Egan's failure to really put the disaster into the context of today. It would have been interesting if he spent more time on exploring how the disaster shaped the lives of people living on the Great Plains now. But otherwise, "The Worst Hard Time" deserves your attention.
Literate Blather your thing? Then scoot on over to Dark Party Review.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I had no clue
Comment: ...since I was born in the late 60's yet here in 2008 I wanted to know about the folks that survived during that period of time, how they lived and why it had all happened. Timothy made this real and "touchable" for me. Your heart breaks for these people, it's a very moving tribute. I came away grateful for everything in my life.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dust to Bust
Comment: Through the striated layers of heartbreak that Tim Egan exposes in this chronicle of the '30s Dust Bowl, it's hard not to wonder why. Why did a sizeable population gravitate to America's high plains in the first place? Why did so many stay in the face of crushing catastrophe? Could no one see the folly in ripping up millions of square miles of prairie with only the vaguest sense of how how to transform it into arable farmland? This story is less about natural disaster than Greek tragedy. Not a page goes by without an example of hubris so glaring it makes the burgeoning horror seem inevitable.
Egan weaves together the territory's history and the personal stories of its settlers with grim effect, punctuating a terrible irony. For all the strength and decency of the characters profiled here, they are victims of something that could have been avoided. The Dust Bowl was a man made event, the triumph of hope over reason.
Egan made a point in this work of detailing only the stories of people who stayed in the High Plains long after the devastating dust storms had reduced their lives to ruin. It's an interesting authorial choice, because he never quite gets to the answer of why they stayed, but in the process of trying, he offers engrossing portraits of characters whose motivations can't be explained by usual human logic. These were people who committed, who stuck. They believed.
In the beginning they came, like anyone in the American epic, to better themselves. In Dalhart, Texas, the center of the storm, we meet Bam White, a transient with a young family looking to settle and find some stability; Hazel Lucas, a young teacher with the simple goal of marrying and raising a family in a wholesome place; Doc Dawson, the tobacco spitting proprietor of the area santitarium; and a score of other colorful, guileless souls whose cheerful resolve gives the place a tragic optimism. No one, not even the dubious, displaced Native Americans in the area, could have foretold what fate had in store for this innocent crew.
Egan doesn't flinch from the bruality at the core of life on the plains. The fight for survival is never pretty, but part of the pathos in this tale lies in the absurdity of man's attempt to conquer nature when nature won't cooperate. "BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY-BRING CLUBS", was a sign posted regularly around Dalhart as the residents tried to eject one particular furry menace by wholesale slaughter. The futility of this approach, and the fury of nature's revenge, becomes apparent toward the end of the book when, after attack after attack by dust storms of biblibical proportions, the Old Testament comes to terrfiying life. From out of nowhere, another black cloud forms over the devastated homesteads, but this one is different, undulating against the sky, alive, with millions and millions of grasshoppers, who settle on anything green and living, and leave death in their wake.
This is the coda to the story of the violence that man inflicted on the High Plains, a reminder of humanity's puny state. But somehow, the story of the surivors is less one of learning than enduring. Perhaps there will always be times with endurance is the Best Last Chance.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A healthy reminder of how easy we have it.
Comment: Save for the descriptions of dust and dirt, which get a little tiring, this book is a great read. His writing style is very readable and his research and understanding of the material is obvious. It is a good lesson for these times we live in. Perhaps we could use some of the wisdom of those times to understand what we need to do to cure our environmental and economic ills.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | |
