 |
 |
PAGE FOUR  PREVIOUS NEXT 
The Worst Hard Time
 The Untold Story of Those Who survived the Great American Dust Bowl
By Timothy Egan
Mariner Books
On April 14, 1935 more than 300,000 tons of topsoil from the Great Plains took to the air, forming a great purplish mass that rained down on the central states of the U.S. from the Dakotas down to the Texas panhandle. This dirt storm, which came to be known as Black Sunday, was the largest during the years of the Great Depression, and blew so much sand, soil and dust into the atmosphere, that, places as far east as New York and Washington D.C. got a gritty mouthful of what the stricken farmers of the Dust Bowl had already been dealing with for half a decade.
In his book, The Worst Hard Time, journalist Timothy Egan follows the lives of several Dust Bowl families from times of great promise in the 1920s into the desperate decade that followed, during which they did battle with the land that once nurtured them. It is a harrowing tale of what happens when man rapes the earth and the earth, literally, takes flight in response.
To the farmers who first came to the central plains to homestead during the early years of the 20th century, the region, only recently cleansed of pesky Indians and buffalo, was a stunning, green expanse of waist-high grasses. At the urging of Herbert Hoover and the U.S. government, homesteaders were encouraged to move to this flat frontier, rip up the thousands-of-years-old sod, plant wheat, be fruitful and multiply. With wheat prices artificially inflated to produce food during WWI, the sodbusters plowed under the useless grass and planted crops as far as the eye could see. For the first — and maybe last — time in their lives, these hardy settlers prospered. They built houses, bought farm machinery, automobiles and appliances on credit, and plowed ever more acres of grass into submission.
The boom times ended at about the same time the stock market crashed in 1929. Wheat prices took a dive and, simultaneously, the rains dried up and storms of wind and dirt began to whip farm families from Nebraska to New Mexico. The dirt and dust choked animals, crops and people alike. These were hardy folk, and no dust storm was going to beat them — at least, not a first. But as the aberrations of drought, dust and plagues of insects turned into a way of life over the course of the 1930s, and hacking coughs turned into dust pneumonia, the farmers began to lose their ability to endure.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by now installed in the White House, sent soil expert High Bennett to study the situation. He reported that the disaster was entirely man-made and that the only way to stop the topsoil from blowing would be to restore the natural grasses that had, until recent times, been holding it down. FDR sent legions of conservation corps employees to plant sod, trees and other erosion-stopping plants. But too much damage had already been done to save the region or most of its settlers. The dust continued to rage during the remainder of the decade and the farmers who had hung on — wearing face masks and watching livestock, land and loved ones die — finally abandoned much of the region.
Egan tells this harrowing story using firsthand reports from the few remaining survivors of that era, diaries, archival accounts from local newspapers and government reports. The personal tales of loss and suffering he recounts are a remarkable testament to the human will to survive and moreover, his fine, nuanced writing is consistently compelling.
Today, what was the Dust Bowl is still a mostly wasted region. Bennett was able to restore some of the grassland, and between that and more sustainable farming practices, the area stopped raising “dusters” by the mid-1950s. But the story of the dust storms and the scorched people and earth they left behind is still a cautionary tale for those who continue to rape the earth for today’s profits, without thinking about tomorrow’s devastating consequences.
Rating: 
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog
 And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook
By Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. and Maia Szalavitz
Basic Books
Gee, Officer Krupke, kids are a product of their environments, after all. At least that’s what child psychiatrist Bruce D. Perry has concluded after decades of studying and working with abused and neglected children. But it’s not that poor nurture creates emotional problems in a psychological vacuum. It’s that poor nurture actually stunts the growth of the brain in critical ways.
In this book, Perry illustrates how poor partenting can physically alter the brain, by recounting some of his more dramatic cases — like the eponymous one about the boy raised in a cage with a pack of dogs, and his intervention with the children who escaped certain immolation and death in David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas.
It doesn’t take being raised in at atmosphere of relentless terror to warp the cortex either, in many cases, all it takes is a lack of holding, loving and eye contact at an early age. When a child’s infanthood or early childhood is seriously devoid of such positive stimuli, the brain doesn’t have a chance to progress from infantile emotional responses to healthy adult behaviors, because the brain simply does not grow properly. This, Perry says, is one way that a host of childhood maladies from learning disorders to outright sociopathy begin.
Dr. Perry wrote his book with journalist Maia Szalavitz, which was an inspired choice, since, too often, professionals with good advice write so poorly that their messages are lost in the mire of dull or convoluted prose. Szalavitz’ skill is evident in the winning choice of stories recounted and the skilled, sometimes lyrical, telling of those stories.
Rating: 
PAGES 1-2-3-4
| |
BLESSEDLY BRIEF
 In an era when environmental degradation at the hands of man has become so omnipresent as to have affected every living being on the face of the earth — and not in a nice way — it is useful to look back to the writings of Rachel Carson. Carson, a U.S. government marine biologist by trade and writer at heart, wrote a number of books about the natural world, including The Sea Around Us. But nothing touched the American imagination like Silent Spring, her examination of the deadly costs of using chemical pesticides with abandon during the post WWII years.
In 1962, when this book was first published, her revelation that the concept of “better living through chemistry” wasn’t always so much better, hit unassuming Americans like a hammer. Her book was a litany of death — death of insects, birds, animals, plants and finally of humans. As she puts it:
“As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that share it with him.”
Though the agencies that were supposed to study the use of these chemicals and regulate them, denied that harm came from their use, Carson proved otherwise. Simply put, she showed that a poison used to kill any living thing, was bound to eventually kill you and me. Ultimately her work changed the way America, and the world, viewed the use of these poisons, which brought about, to the relief of condors everywhere, the ban of the deadly pesticide DDT.
But, Americans became complacent in the decades following the outcry this book originally fomented, and our world is again awash with death. Now would be a good time to break out this old chestnut and reexamine the ideas Carson put forth almost half a century ago. Because, anything that’s killing bugs, is still killing you.
Al Gore's introduction is nice, too.
 The legacy of Hurricane Katrina lives on both in the ruined cities of the gulf coast and the psyches of its survivors. It also endures in a lengthy list of books written since that catastrophe occurred, only two years ago. Michael Tisserand, who was a music writer for New Orleans’ alternative weekly, Gambit, is one of many who have taken a stab at conveying the personal experience of having one’s world churned to bits in that Mix Master of natural disaster followed by national ineptitude.
His chronicle, Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans teacher and His Storm-struck Students Created a School to Remember, concentrates on the attempts of his family and his neighbors to create a kind of normalcy for their children after loss of home and city. Since Katrina, landed on America’s shores in September 2005, most of the children who lived through the disaster had no place to begin the next school term. Those who did went to school in makeshift, temporary shelters or in new towns that were not entirely happy to see them.
Tisserand and his children were staying with friends in Carencro, a Louisiana town near Lafayette. Luckily for him, and for some of his neighbors who had landed nearby, their kids’ first grade teacher, Paul Reynaud had also fled to the area with his aging parents. Reynaud, as described, is an exemplary educator with an innate feel for the needs of children, and it took little effort to convince him to open Sugarcane Academy, a DIY school for those children he already knew, and others in need.
More than just the story of his own childrens' experiences, Tisserand’s book is the story of what happened to many of the children who were displaced by the storm, the traumas they faced and the adults who helped to stabilize their world. It is but one snapshot of a bigger picture of the aftermath of this memorable disaster, but it is one that is rendered with poignancy and hope.
|
|
