The Worst Hard Time, which won this year’s National Book Award for nonfiction, focuses on the epicenter of the Dust Bowl - a stretch of high plains ranging from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles through the southeastern corner of Colorado and the western half of Kansas up to the Nebraska border. He examines the causes and effects of the Dust Bowl not only with the knowledge hindsight brings but also through the eyes of those who lived through it and even those who did not survive it economically or physically. That is where Timothy Egan’s award-winning The Worst Hard Time does what history writers really should do.

Today, we have lost or are losing many of the people who survived that era. Around here, you can still hear references to “the Dirty ’30s.” It is more commonly known throughout the country as “the Dust Bowl,” a nightmare immortalized by the classic images captured by Dorthea Lange and other government photographers or Henry Fonda and the rest of the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.Īs a child, I recall relatives talking about monstrous dust storms in the northern plains. Yet what constitutes a significant portion of the plains today is to a great extent the result of a modern ecological disaster. In fact, even though I have never lived anywhere but in a town or city, the five acres of land filled with prairie grasses that can never be developed are what led my wife and I to build our house on an abutting lot.

While others may not see it, those of us who live on the Great Plains - whether southern or northern - find a certain inherent beauty in the prairie.

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