BOOKS: The Worst Hard Time

"Absolutely Remarkable..."

THE WORST HARD TIME
by Timothy Egan

(A Mariner Book/Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

National Book Award Winner

THE WORST HARD TIME got off to a slow start for me: I re-read the Introduction and the first chapter to figure out what the author was saying (on a subject all new to me), to make notes on the narrative and characters as they were introduced, so I could follow the stories.

THE WORST HARD TIME is a history of people and events we've never heard about before: How the U.S. Government, in the early part of the 20th century, encouraged settlement in the High Plains (Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma), and then, through barely a generation of speculation, promotion, fraud, naivete and greed, the land was stripped bare -- millions of acres of natural grasslands were plowed under, causing the biggest environmental disaster ever, resulting in the Dust Bowl.

In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck famously wrote about the Exodusters of The Dirty Thirties: The people who left the region during this time in search of work and a new life on the West Coast. THE WORST HARD TIME is the living history of the people who stayed and survived a bleak and dismal existence in the midst of dust and The Depression.

As a writer and an avid reader, I have to say, Chapter 16, "Black Sunday," is one of the best chapters in any book I have ever read. On Black Sunday, April 14, 1935, "the great grand daddy of all dust storms" raged and ravaged the High Plains from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, affecting thousands of people and animals, millions of acres, and tons of dirt, eventually even as far East as New York and Washington, D.C. It was an epic event, catastrophic on a Hurricane Katrina scale, riveting and shocking. I had never heard about it. Egan's masterful recounting of the storm, along with pictures from that day, as it roiled down through the plains, literally rolling over all the people and places we became acquainted with in the first 15 chapters of THE WORST HARD TIME was absolutely incredible.

From a slow start, THE WORST HARD TIME quickly became riveting, through characters, events, and Timothy Egan's masterful historic development -- one of the best books I have ever read, fiction or non-fiction. After re-reading those first chapters, I could not put the book down.