The Worst Hard Time: Timothy Egan's nonfiction account of Americans who struggled to survive the longest-lasting (and man-made) natural disaster to affect the USA in its history to date, the horrendous Dust Bowl storms that laid waste to the high plains during the 1930s and so the peak years of the Great Depression's economic devastations. This is not the story of those who fled and settled elsewhere in those hard times, but rather of those who stayed and fought the black dust and crop failures, either unable to leave or unwilling to give up the former grassland that was never meant for what had been done to it by farmers trying to plow and plant it as if they were working land with trees and topsoil. A tale of greed, scams, ignorance, hubris, thoughtless policy, and efforts to survive all of that.... once it all came home to roost in dust storms so blinding that people tied themseves to outbuildings and porch rails so as not to get lost in their own yards, storms that left animals dead of ingested sand, land gone barren and left hard as a road, homes that required shoveling out every day. Fascinating stories, cautionary tale.
