He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Stark and powerful, a gripping if depressing read and a timely reminder that a Nature abused can exact a terrible retribution.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Among them is country physician Doc Dawson, who opened a sanitarium for dust pneumonia victims, lost all his money farming and spent his last, penniless years running a soup kitchen.

In the midst of disaster, Egan finds heroes. But then the Depression hit, wheat prices crashed and once-bountiful farms went fallow, abandoned to the deepening drought and ever-blowing winds that literally sent the soil skyward. The newly invented tractor made the job easier, and unusually wet weather in the late ’20s made farming on the arid plains seem feasible. The great southern plains, once covered with native grasses that fed the buffalo and held the soil in place, were essentially stripped bare in the 1920s by wheat-farmers eager to cash in on cheap land and high grain prices. In truth, the dust bowl was largely a human creation. The author personalizes this tragedy by focusing on a handful of hardy settlers who came to America’s heartland with high hopes and boundless energy, then watched with growing despair as the earth turned against them. Thousands died from “dust pneumonia,” a new condition born of swallowing and inhaling the swirling topsoil. From 1930 to 1935, nearly a million people left their farms, littered with animal corpses and stunted crops. The “dust bowl” of the 1930s covered 100 million acres spread over five states: Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska and Colorado. Grim, riveting account by New York Times reporter Egan makes clear that, although hurricanes and floods have grabbed recent headlines, America’s worst assault from Mother Nature came in the form of ten long years of drought and dust.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan