The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan wins Texas Book Award

Timothy Egan, a reporter for the New York Times, has won the fourth
biennial Texas Christian University Texas Book Award for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. The $5,000 award is sponsored by the Friends of the TCU Library and TCU Press.

The book has also won other awards:

The 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction
The Oklahoma Book Award
The Western Heritage(Wrangler)Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

The Worst Hard Time would be a good book to read following The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin. A few days ago I posted a description of The Children’s Blizzard, which was read recently by one of HCPL’s book groups.

In The Worst Hard Time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Timothy Egan follows, in a similar scheme to Laskin, a few pioneering families and an overwhelming disaster that overtook them, this time during the period of the Dust Bowl. In this book the disasters the families lived through, both economic and ecological, were man-made. Egan writes how eight years of drought on the windy plains, which had been ploughed up for wheat, led to an endless series of dust storms or “black blizzards.” "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains." As Egan shows, the plains were not suited to arable farming and with the drought all the topsoil was blown into the air. Like Laskin, Egan spends a while describing the hardy Americans and immigrants who settled the area, desperate in the Depression for a piece of land and lured there by the false claims of promoters. Egan interviewed actual survivors of those hard times, and the book is filled with tales of courage and suffering. As well as stories of privation, there are horrific accounts of the effects of the black blizzard, such as the "dust pneumonia" which killed both young and old. Publishers Weekly said, “With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds.”

BlogaBook Points of Discussion

Publishers Weekly compares The Worst Hard Time to the novels of Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis. What do you think?

What remains most in your mind when you have finished this book?

The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin

In January the Books By the Bay book group met in the Havre de Grace branch of Harford County Public Library and discussed The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin.

On January 12 1888 a blizard struck the Great Plains region, killing about 500 people, 100 of whom were schoolchildren, who were totally unprepared and unprotected from what happened. The children’s parents were the brave immigrants who had recently settled the area. They are portrayed as totally naïve about the land they had settled, and so ignorant of what the local weather could do that on an unseasonably warm day many allowed their children to attend school without coats, hats and mittens. During the day the temperature dropped rapidly, and a blizzard ensued that many remembered as the worst that the area had ever seen.

The story has two main threads. The first is the story of five immigrant families and what happened to them in the storm. The families are put into the context of the great push into the upper Great Plains, especially by immigrants from Norway, Germany and Russia. Laskin goes into considerable detail of the immigrant experience, the hardships they faced, what made them leave home in the first place.

The second main thread is the story of the inner workings of the US Army Signal Corps, which was then in charge of weather forecasting. There is considerable detail about the formation of severe storms and the science of meteorolgy at the time.

When the storm hit, many children were trapped at school. Laskin relates the differing and sometimes heroic actions of the teachers. There are stories of heroism and also of senseless tragedy.

BlogaBook Discussion Points

Chapters about the settlers are alternated with chapters about the fledgling weather service. One reviewer felt that, “Laskin is at his best when he relates the heartbreaking stories of the storm’s victims; the chapters on weather history interrupt the book’s flow.” Would you agree with this?

Another reviewer found the book to be, “somewhat information-heavy.” Would you agree, or do you think with the reviewer that the possible drawback of the density of the detail is balanced by the empathy we feel for the children? How do you think Laskin provokes this empathy in the reader?

More reviewers found the story to be, “gripping,” “spellbinding,” “well-told, “adroit,” “sensitive,” and “horrific.” Was this true for you, or did you get bogged down in all the separate threads and the historical detail?

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