Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Americans View Their Dustbowl Experience

Americans View Their Dustbowl Experience by John R. Wunder (Editor), Frances W. Kaye (Editor)   429 pages

While this is a great compilation of essays that include first-person accounts of the Dust Bowl, and the book includes many facts, this book is a much drier read than the book about the Dust Bowl by Dayton Duncan (and definitely much drier than The Worst Hard Time).  The book is divided into sections of contemporary accounts and also retrospective analysis of the Dust Bowl and there is a large section about institutional activism, as well as an extensive bibliography. 

This was an interesting read, although at times a bit of a slog. However, it's a good addendum if you really want to understand certain aspects about the Dust Bowl, especially the political decisions of the time.  I did sometimes wonder about where the different authors of the essays were getting their information from; For example, one essay, which had many citations in different places, said "Rural women's fertility has tended to be higher than that of urban women..."  without any citation to back this up.  I found this odd, and it wasn't the only instance where there was a statement like this where you'd expect some kind of citation and there was nothing there.

If you're interested in the Dust Bowl, I would recommend The Worst Hard Time instead, as well as The Dust Bowl by Dayton Duncan (which accompanied the Ken Burns documentary).

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