Blowin’ in the Wind
YEARS OF DUST
A man in rumpled clothes walks down a dirt highway. Ahead of him the ground and sky blur together in a bright haze. He has a bedroll slung on one shoulder and stoops a little from the weight. His boots are covered in dust. Turn the page: the man disappears. There’s a second photograph, twice as wide, with a road that is achingly empty. Overhead, a black cloud blots out the sky.
So begins “Years of Dust: The Story of the Dust Bowl,” Albert Marrin’s engrossing account of what was arguably the worst ecological disaster in American history. When a severe drought struck the Midwest in 1931, farmers had been churning up the Great Plains for more than half a century. Without native grasses to anchor the topsoil, fields crumbled to dust. Millions of acres of arable land were swept away in black blizzards. Hungry families headed west, pinning their hopes on California. Dust blew so far east, it settled on the White House lawn.
In the best possible way, “Years of Dust” feels like a museum in the form of a book. Marrin knits together natural science and sociology, news stories, snippets from novels and poems, eyewitness descriptions, journal entries, and the words of hard-time bards like John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie. His selection of photographs — paired with maps, posters, engravings and other artifacts — brings the blown-out landscapes to life. (Imagine how thin our understanding of the Dust Bowl would be without iconic images from documentary photographers like Dorothea Lange. Even in the 1930s, these were events you had to see to believe — without pictures, the truth sounded like hyperbole.)
YEARS OF DUST
The Story of the Dust Bowl
By Albert Marrin
128 pp. Dutton Children’s Books. $22.99. (Ages 10 and up)
THE DUST BOWL THROUGH THE LENS
How Photography Revealed and Helped Remedy a National Disaster
By Martin W. Sandler. 96 pp. Walker & Company. $19.99. (Ages 10 to 14)
THE STORM IN THE BARN
Written and illustrated by Matt Phelan
201 pp. Candlewick Press. $24.99. (Ages 10 and up)
