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).
This blog is the home of the St. Louis Public Library team for the Missouri Book Challenge. The Missouri Book Challenge is a friendly competition between libraries around the state to see which library can read and blog about the most books each year. At the library level, the St. Louis Public Library book challenge blog is a monthly competition among SLPL staff members and branches. For the official Missouri Book Challenge description see: http://mobookchallenge.blogspot.com/p/about-challenge.h
Wednesday, October 25, 2017
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