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A review by toggle_fow
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
4.0
Some serious history. I learned a lot.
This was hard to read because it is not about one of my special historical interests, and also because it is essentially a narration of pure human misery. It does a lot of backstory, starting basically at the Civil War to tell us how and why the Dust Bowl came to be, and then tells the story of the Dust Bowl years by tracking the destroyed and desolate lives of twenty-odd Dust Bowl families.
Finally, it strands you with an unsettling "and things got better for some reason and they're still irresponsibly farming that land by draining and wasting all the water underneath America and we'll regret it in 50 years. The end."
Educational, but brutal.
This was hard to read because it is not about one of my special historical interests, and also because it is essentially a narration of pure human misery. It does a lot of backstory, starting basically at the Civil War to tell us how and why the Dust Bowl came to be, and then tells the story of the Dust Bowl years by tracking the destroyed and desolate lives of twenty-odd Dust Bowl families.
Finally, it strands you with an unsettling "and things got better for some reason and they're still irresponsibly farming that land by draining and wasting all the water underneath America and we'll regret it in 50 years. The end."
Educational, but brutal.