Review
From the book jacket: The dust storms that terrorized America's High
Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before
or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told.
Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the
rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to
huddling in basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort
to keep the dust out. He follows their desperate attempts to carry on through
blinding black blizzards, crop failure, and the deaths of loved ones. Drawing on
the voices of those who stayed and survived—those who, now in their eighties and
nineties, will soon carry their memories to the grave—Egan tells a story of
endurance and heroism against the backdrop of the Great Depression....
Beyond the Book
The economic slump known as the
Great Depression began in the USA but
ended up effecting Europe, and other industrialized parts of the world from 1929
to about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever
experienced by the industrialized Western world. The US economy was
already in depression before the Stock Market collapse of October 1929, but the
precipitous decline in values put great strain on individual investors and
financial institutions (by 1933 11,000 of the US's 25,000 banks had been
declared insolvent). By 1932 stock prices were at just 20% of their 1929
value and manufacturing output was down 54% due to a drastic reduction of
demand; about 12 to 15 million workers were unemployed (about 25-30% of the work
force)....
