A young boy listens to his grandfather's story of farm life during the Dust Bowl years.

In a memoir in prose and poetry, the author traces his development from a poor Oklahoma farm boy during the depths of the Depression to a respected medieval scholar and outstanding Native American poet.

In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms.Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as "the Buffalo Commons," where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies that once existed.

This “riveting” companion to the PBS documentary “clarifies our understanding of the ‘worst manmade ecological disaster in American history’” (Booklist). In this riveting chronicle, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns capture the profound drama of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Terrifying photographs of mile-high dust storms, along with firsthand accounts by more than two dozen eyewitnesses, bring to life this heart-wrenching catastrophe, when a combination of drought, wind, and poor farming practices turned millions of acres of the Great Plains into a wasteland, killing crops and livestock, threatening the lives of small children, burying homesteaders’ hopes under huge dunes of dirt—and setting in motion a mass migration the likes of which the nation had never seen. Burns and Duncan collected more than three hundred mesmerizing photographs, some never before published, scoured private letters, government reports, and newspaper articles, and conducted in-depth interviews to produce a document that may likely be the last recorded testimony of the generation who lived through this defining decade.

"Using the writings of his grandmother, Margaret Spader Neises, and mother, Joan Neises Volk, author Craig Volk creates a one-year diary that details the life and times of a woman during 1932."--

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows. The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect” (New York Times). In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet” (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a powerful reminder about the dangers of trifling with nature. This e-book includes a sample chapter of THE IMMORTAL IRISHMAN.

Housewives hung wet sheets and blankets over windows, struggling to seal every crack with gummed paper strips. A man avoided shaking hands, lest the static electricity gathered from a dust storm knock his greeter flat. Children's tears turned to mud. Horses chewed feed filled with dust particles that sandpapered their gums raw. Dead cattle, when pried open, were filled with pounds of gut-clogging dirt. The simplest thing in life, taking a breath, became life-threatening. The Dust Bowl conditions during the "Dirty Thirties" were no blind stroke of nature, but had their origins in human error and in the misuse of the land. The Dust Bowl, Updated Edition recounts the factors that led to the Dust Bowl conditions, how those affected coped, and what can be learned from the tragedy, considered by many to be America's worst prolonged environmental disaster.