Thought I'd repost this for summer readers
"The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan is an amazing story about the Dust Bowl - the events that caused the Dust Bowl and the firsthand stories of the people who lived through it (the 2/3 of the population who stayed, not the people who left the area ala Steinbeck).
It is a fast and easy read because it is so interesting and entertaining - it is full of
amazing statistics, great characters, and history I hadn't heard anything about before (and that takes some doing).
Obviously I knew about the Dust Bowl, but I didn't realize just how major the dust storms were or how far the dust went - the biggest storm moved 2x the amount of soil excavated to dig the Panama Canal (7 year project) in
a day and dust was affecting ships 200+ miles off the east coast.
Some rather scary parallels to today's news (it was published in 2006), international syndicates influencing policy to make $, people refusing to believe that their actions impact nature, the government artificially propping up prices of commodities and then reluctant to interfere in the "free market", banks using their depositors assets to make interest free loans to bank officers and other insiders, politicians blatantly disregarding the laws they authored, people getting loans to buy things they can't afford when the bubble pops............
Lots of WOW statistics and interesting connections to other world events that helped cause it - even Catherine the Great and the Volga Germans factored in.
