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?
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?
Labels: blogabook, book clubs, book discussions, book groups, Children's Blizzard, Worst Hard Time
posted by Elizabeth @ 2:07 PM
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