Timothy Egan

Audiobook(Narrated by Patrick Lawlor)

I’ve always been fascinated by The Great Depression. I am not sure exactly why but I it has always held a particular interest when I am choosing to read about history. However, in learning about The Great Depression, I had never taken the time to learn about The Dust Bowl. 
As I mentioned in a previous post, I thought The Dust Bowl was a brief incident that happened during the same time period as the depression but in reading The Worst Hard Time , I came to understand how little I knew. I must have been talking during that section of history class.

The Worst Hard Time  chronicles the events in areas of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Colorado where the grasslands were plowed up during the wheat boom and the destruction that was left behind when the land was left blowing and desolate. After finishing the book I am amazed at the perseverance of the people who managed to hang on and at the same time I am horrified that they tried.  They seriously must have thought the world was ending with huge walls of dust descending upon them followed by hoards of grasshoppers. Every time they tried to plant something to sustain themselves it was killed either by dust, hot, dry, winds or grasshoppers.

Some of the other nightmares they faced:

• People went five years or more with absolutely no income and after selling off everything they owned, they resorted to pickling tumbleweed to avoid starving to death.
• Hungry livestock chewed on fence posts. They died because their digestive tracts were so full of dust that food couldn’t get through.
• People hung wet sheets and wore face masks made of sponge in an effort to keep the dust out of their homes and lungs yet people still died from “dust pneumonia.”
• Towns and counties were decimated by this tragedy and in some areas both the population and the land have never been the same.

One part, in particular, that touched me was when a woman was found burning a diary written during that time because it was such a bad time that there was nothing worth remembering. I am so glad that diary was rescued and parts of it are found in The Worst Hard Time. It’s hard to even imagine being in the writer’s circumstance and how hopeless he must have felt but at the same time, I am glad his voice survived for those of us who weren’t there to see the devastation. It is unimaginable but Timothy Egan helps to give us a glimpse.

I thought this book was so good that I plan on owning my own copy so I can read it again. I highly recommend The Worst Hard Time whether you are a fan of history, this particular era, or if you are just looking for a fascinating book to read. The writing is excellent and I absolutely didn’t want to stop listening. It’s very informative. The speculating that we saw in the recent housing boom has eery similarities to the wheat boom right before The Dust Bowl. There are lessons to be learned about human greed that runs unchecked. This is my favorite book, so far, of 2009 and I understand why it is a winner of the National Book Award.(5/5)

Steven Johnson
Library Book
256 pgs

Reason for Reading: NYT Notable Books challenge and it seems to be pretty popular at my library so I read it while I could get my hands on it.

Back of the Book: This is a story with four protagonists: a deadly bacterium, a vast city, and two gifted but very different men. On dark week a hundred and fifty years ago, in the midst of great terror and human suffering, their lives collided on the streets of London.

From Me: The back of the book makes this sound a lot more exciting than it is. That’s not to say that it isn’t a very interesting story but in more of an informative way rather than a page-turner way.

There is quite a bit of information to be gleaned here, especially from a scientific and historical perspective. What exactly is cholera and what does it take for it to flourish? What were the thoughts of the city health officials and the medical community regarding disease and prevention and why were they so slow to accept changes in thought and procedure even when presented with compelling evidence? Why did some people who lived in the nastiest squalor live while people who lived in comparatively clean conditions die?

Without a doubt, the most startling thing I learned from reading this is what a nasty place Victorian London was. With a population of over 2 million people in 90 square miles before reliable sewer systems were invented, it was a disease-infested place that was notorious for it’s awful stench.

I had a somewhat romanticized vision of what Victorian London must have been like, but now I understand it would have been a horrid place.

I enjoyed reading this book even though it didn’t turn out to be the way I expected it to be and it thoroughly grossed me out in a few places. (3/5)