The Worst Hard Time: An American Tragedy

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 42-45

42 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

The Worst Hard Time:

An American Tragedy

By Oliver Houck

The Worst Hard Time : The Untold Story of Tho se Who Survived

the Great Amer ican Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan . Houghton Miff‌lin.

340 pages.

From the May/ June 2007 issue of The Environmental Fo rum.

Over years of teaching, I have made of

list of must-read books from which

my students may choose. e only

rule for inclusion is that the books treat some

aspect of t he environment, that they be fac-

tual, and that they be very, very good. I started

small, with a few classics on which we would

all agree, but over time the list has swelled with

new entries, hard to deny, in the manner of the

Baseball Hall of Fame.

is fall I will do something dierent. I

will oer them the choice of one of two books,

both recent, both stunning, with enormous

repercussions in policy and law, both destined

to become classics in the eld. And written so

well t hat you are tempted to read them a loud (which can be an annoying

habit if your spouse is quite happy reading something else). One is Timothy

Egan’s e Worst Hard Time: e Untold Story of ose Who Survived the

Great American Dustbowl. e other is John Vaillant’s e Golden Spruce: A

True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed (reviewed on page 49). Set in almost

diametrically opposite environments, the rst tells the saga of the Great Dust

Bowl while t he second treats the fate of the great stands of virgin timber

along the Pacic Northwest coast. ey are much the same story. e land

and its people will never be the same.

Early in e Worst hard Time, Timothy Ega n describes driving through

western Oklahoma, past deserted towns and farmsteads, today, seventy years

past the events of his book, and sums up his na rrative: