Reddit reviews The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
We found 17 Reddit comments about The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Great product!
Yep! One of the big problems was that settlers started heavily farming during a relatively wet period, tearing up all the sod and grass that was there. Then the drought came and there was nothing to hold all that soil down, so it was blown all over.
Ships out in the Atlantic got covered with soil carried from the Great Plains. I'm probably simplifying things a lot, but that's the gist of it.
If you're interested, I'd recommend The Worst Hard Time. Some of the stories are just crazy.
I recommend you read The Worst Hard Time about the American dust bowl. Everything that you wrote is exactly the hubris that resulted in the worst man-made natural disaster in history.
Just because you can't understand how the massive scale modern industry is polluting your planet doesn't mean that it's not happening.
The man-made ecological devastation that is currently ravaging the world will permanently leave its scar on the archeological and fossil record for hundreds of millions of years.
> Follow the money.
Right, of course. I forgot that there were no moneyed interests in maintaining the fossil fuel burning status quo. /s
"The Worst Hard Time" is a good book about it.
https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Hard-Time-Survived-American/dp/0618773479
Yes and no. It was a combination of drought and the fact that farmers, in their zeal, replaced hardy native prairie grasses that were adapted to centuries of drought cycles with significantly less hardy wheat. Once the wheat dried up and died, there was nothing left to hold the topsoil down, and the rest is history.
I can highly recommend The Worst Hard Time if you'd like to read more on the fascinating and sad history of the Dust Bowl, usually largely overlooked in history classes but with some significant and surprising parallels to the modern day.
Great pics! Have you read The Worst Hard Time? it's a really interesting book about the Dust Bowl. I didn't fully appreciate the scope of the disaster before reading it - it still is hard to comprehend dust storms capable of moving hundreds of tons of topsoil.
And read Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time, which was a source for Burn's work and goes into greater detail.
Ed. I had many in my family (all dead now) who survived this. I'm not sure which caused more of my dad's PTSD: nearly starving during the depression or the hell of WW2. He was obsessed with cleanliness, though. The dust got everywhere. There was no stopping it.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. Dark. Tragic. Informative. Reads almost like a novel.
La Relación by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is a firsthand account of an 8-year odyssey across North America by a European shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico in the early 1500's. The tone is in stark contrast from other material of the same period, offering an objective and often sympathetic glimpse of the diverse native cultures encountered along the way.
Both of these books haunt me, because they describe worlds that no longer exist. We live in their dystopia.
First, I have a very US-centric perspective, so you may notice that in my recommendations. I'm just looking at my bookcase recommending anything I've read and enjoyed (if it's on my bookcase, I enjoyed it). I have a lot more books in boxes, so if you want more recommendations do let me know. Also, if you want more information on any of the books, feel free to ask me.
Books:
History of the World by J.M. Roberts
A Study of History by Arnold Tonybee
Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization by Bruce Thorton
The Story of Civilization - Will & Ariel Durant
Separated at Birth: How North Korea Became the Evil Twin by Gordon Cucullu
The Fall of Japan: The Last Blazing Weeks of World War II by William Craig
The Century of Revolution: 1603-1714 by Christopher Hill
China's Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture by Charles Hucker
Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics by Colbert Held
Concise History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Ian Bickerton
The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict by Walter Lagueur
A Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden
The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880-1950
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles Mann
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
The Second World War by Winston Churchill
Documentaries:
The World at War
Ken Burns: The Civil War
Civilisation: A Personal View
Just finished a great book on it: The Worst Hard Time
I wish I had more time to give a great answer but allow me to highly, with weight on that, recommend The Worst Hard Time (https://www.amazon.com/Worst-Hard-Time-Survived-American/dp/0618773479) by Timothy Eganif you want more about the time period and want a very readable, edutaining book.
The Lady and the Panda
The true story of Ruth Harkness, a socialite who married a rich adventurer. He died alone in China on a quest to be the first westerner to bring back a live panda. She took over and succeeded.
The Worst Hard Time
Stories from survivors of the Dust Bowl. It's less a "journey adventure" book than the others listed, but a pretty epic tale of what these people endured.
For those unfamiliar with the Dust Bowl situation and all the components that led up to it, a really amazing book is The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Then I'd suggest you read This Time is Different and The Worst Hard Time. There are quite a few parallels between the current crisis and the Great Depression.
Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 were superb narrative histories of World War Two in the East. On the American end, the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy - An Army at Dawn and The Day of Battle are great. I think somebody else mentioned The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Just the first paragraph of that book is worth the price of the paperback.
If you're not into the whole military thing, The Worst Hard Time by Tim Egan covers the dustbowl era in the southern plains. Reads like an epic novel.
All of these suggestions prioritize craft of writing over intellectual rigor. I studied history, so I have a keen appreciation for the value (and the limits) of academic history. These books are not that sort of history, though I don't think any of them get any facts egregiously wrong. It's just that they're remarkable for being well-written - which should appeal to a fiction enthusiast - not for being pathbreaking academic treatments of their subject matter.
I just read this history book it was pretty good, I enjoyed it. It's told in an interesting way so it's not really boring
Close to Shore, by Michael Capuzzo
The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Times, about how America brought about, what was at the time, the largest man made environmental disaster the world had ever seen, the Dust Bowl.
My favorite part was when Congress was bitching about what to do about it in D.C, all of a sudden the city gets pummeled by a great, suffocating, rolling red dust cloud.
A man asks, " What the hell is falling from the air?!"
The man from the heart of the disaster answers, " Gentleman, that's Nebraska."
It was not just the dust and starvation and thirst, you know. It was your lungs turning to glass from the silica in the air, until they shattered and cut open lungs and hearts which died drowning in blood. It was the overwhelming number of spiders, centipedes, and insects driving people mad. It was the crackling air full of balls of fire and dry lightning and the rolling black darkness. The earth was dead, but once airborne, it became a plague, and every horde visited the American midwest in a way to put the bible to shame. The earth was a dug up zombie then, and it roamed brutal.
That was a crime we should have watched more closely. It was no mystery, but the big ones never are mysteries. Usually it's just stupid and money.