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Cargando... The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (2006 original; edición 2006)por Timothy Egan
Información de la obraThe Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl por Timothy Egan (2006)
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InscrÃbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I knew very little about the dust bowl prior to reading this book and had only a mild interest. Now I feel like I knew people who lived through it and what an amazing thing it was to have lived through it. this book is a great lesson in ecology and a warning if what happens when one fools with Mother Nature. ( ) For 6 years, in the American West, the skies rained down tons of topsoil and searing electrical storms from on high to create hell on earth. Even with massive reclamation projects, some of the areas that were destroyed on the high plains during the dust bowl years will never be more than barren deserts. Have we learned anything? If the fiercely independent settlers of the high plains were able to swallow their pride, admit their part in altering the ecology of the land, and adopt government programs to reclaim the land , perhaps today we, too, can collectively successfully address our current environmental concerns. In this possibility lies the hope behind this dreadful story. This history of the arid western lands and how people came from the East to farm it, only to destroy the ancient grasslands and cause the largest environmental disaster in US history was fascinating. Not fun, not a happy story, but fascinating. I had to look up photos of the dust storms on the web after I listened to this audiobook. They are unbelievable. This was a very interesting and informative read---I learned a few things and definitely had a shift of perspective about this time in history. I'd been told that my great grandmother and her family went through the Dust Bowl but looking at the timeline compared to where they were doing those years, it looks like they were probably more financially affected by the lack of work than by the bulk of the dust storms themselves. Her family left Beaver County, Oklahoma (in the heart of the Dust Bowl) in the 1920s and went east to Enid (east of the worst of it by a couple hundred miles, according to this book). So they were out of there long before the dusters started hitting, but definitely would have felt the financial fall out of that mixed with the other effects of the Great Depression. From what I can tell, that family began to move west to Oregon in the early 1950s, with my great-grandmother arriving within 10 years of that. Reading about the beginning of the depression reminded me of last summer when the government was buying truckloads of produce from farmers and distributing it free all over the country due to the effects of COVID. As much as I say I don't want to rely on the govt. for anything, it was sad and a little scary to read about what these people went through before the advent of govt. aid. I suppose I'm appreciative that the help is there for those who need it, but I also think it's heavily abused and should be more strictly regulated. I was surprised that more mention wasn't made of the correlation between the "plagues" suffered during this time and the Exodus plagues. I imagine that was hot on most minds, being the Bible belt and all. I also learned that "No Man's Land" is a real place! I was surprised by the naiveté of many who tried all kinds of strange things to induce rain. Scientific methods of the time included dynamiting the sky, plowing to create atmospheric disturbances, laying out dead snakes on fences, and trusting the steam from trains to make the skies weep. In addition to that, I think there was a bit of ignorance in Washington about how big of an area they were dealing with. One solution to the problem of blowing dust was to just asphalt the entire Great Plains, and Roosevelt had the brainy idea to plant a forest over the entire area to change the climate. Oy! But speaking of naive... I was really interested and surprised to learn how big of an issue static electricity was during the storms. I didn't realize it built up with such strength as to make a couple of friends fall over shaking hands! This was a super interesting read and really caused me to think about the things I freak out about nowadays. Nothing I've ever gone through compares to the things these brave (and maybe stubborn?) people went through.
The Worst Hard Time," takes the shape of a classic disaster tale. We meet the central characters (the "nesters" who farmed around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles); dire warnings (against plowing) are voiced but ignored; and then all hell breaks loose. Ten-thousand-foot-high dust storms whip across the landscape, choking people and animals, and eventually laying waste to one of the richest ecosystems on earth. Racing at 50 miles an hour, the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930's blasted paint off buildings; soil crushed trees, dented cars and drifted into 50-foot dunes. Tsunamis of grasshoppers devoured anything that drought, hail and tornadoes had spared. To the settlers, "it seemed on many days as if a curtain were being drawn across a vast stage at world's end." Families couldn't huddle together for warmth or love: the static electricity would knock them down. Children died of dust pneumonia, and livestock suffocated on dirt, their insides packed with soil. Women hung wet sheets in windows, taped doors and stuffed cracks with rags. None of this really worked. Housecleaning, in this era, was performed with a shovel. On April 14, 1935, the biggest dust storm on record descended over five states, from the Dakotas to Amarillo, Texas. People standing a few feet apart could not see each other; if they touched, they risked being knocked over by the static electricity that the dust created in the air. The Dust Bowl was the product of reckless, market-driven farming that had so abused the land that, when dry weather came, the wind lifted up millions of acres of topsoil and whipped it around in "black blizzards," which blew as far east as New York. This ecological disaster rapidly disfigured whole communities. Egan's portraits of the families who stayed behind are sobering and far less familiar than those of the "exodusters" who staggered out of the High Plains. He tells of towns depopulated to this day, a mother who watched her baby die of "dust pneumonia," and farmers who gathered tumbleweed as food for their cattle and, eventually, for their children. Tiene como guÃa de estudio aPremiosDistincionesListas de sobresalientes
History.
Nonfiction.
The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prizeâ??winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Drawing on the voices of those who stayed and survived-those who, now in their eighties and nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave-Egan tells a story of endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression. Egan captures the very voice of the time-its grit, pathos, and abiding heroism-as only great history can. Combining the human drama of Isaac's Storm with the sweep of The American People in the Great Depression, The Worst Hard Time is a lasting and important work of American histo No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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