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

“We dream of the faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture, but we wake to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred.” —Caroline Henderson, 1934.

“We are getting deeper and deeper in dust.” The Boise City News, 1934.

“Our country has been beaten, swept, scarred, and torn by the most adverse weather conditions since June, 1932. It is bare, desolate and damaged. Our people have been buffeted about by every possible kind of misfortune. It has appeared that the hate of all nature has been poured out against us.” —John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart, Texas newspaper, The Texan, 1935.

“Three little words, achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent —‘if it rains.'” —Bob Geiger, AP reporter.

“If God can’t make rain in Kansas, how can the New Deal hope to succeed?” —A U.S. congressman on ambitious government plans to renew the soil and bring rain to the Dust Bowl.

An amazing true story. My grandparents and my husband’s parents lived in West Texas during these times and must have experienced some of the drought, dust storms, and hard times chronicled in Egan’s book. But I never heard them talk about anything like the stories in the book: dust so thick that people got lost and ran their cars off the road, respiratory diseases caused by the dust, dusters, clouds of dust so tall they blotted out the sun. I remember dust storms when I was growing up in San Angelo in West Texas, but nothing like the cataclysmic storms of the 1930’s.