The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History - Tapa dura

"Stormy and dark, this reads like a family scrapbook you might banish to the far corners of the attic. Who wants to remember such hard times, captured here on hardened faces and in fear-filled eyes? Why dwell on such a troublesome blip in the triumphant narrative of American manifest destiny? Fortunately, Duncan and Burns don't hesitate. Their masterful volume accompanies a November PBS documentary about the environmental catastrophe brought on by fierce drought and heedless over-cultivation in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico in the 1930s. The authors have relied on interviews with some two dozen survivors, who tell of children going to school wearing gas masks and goggles to block out the dust. Once-grassy plains became lunar landscapes, bleached and featureless. The numbers alone are stunning. In 1934, the U.S. government spent half of what it had spent throughout all of World War I just to combat the drought. Toward the end of the decade, nine million acres of land had been abandoned-an area equal to Maryland. After this year's long, dry summer, as we face the prospect of rising temperatures, this is a story full of foreboding" -Smithsonian magazine "This riveting, illustrated volume of vivid written and oral history extends the scope of the film...and clarifies our understanding of the 'worst manmade ecological disaster in American history.'...Burns and Duncan chronicle every harrowing phase of this 'decade of human pain and environmental degradation.' The result is a resounding chronicle of why we must preserve Earth's life-sustaining ecosystems" - Booklist

It was a decade-long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions.; It was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.; It was an epic of human pain and suffering. The story of the Dust Bowl is also the story of heroic perseverance. In this riveting chronicle, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns capture, in words and pictures, the profound dram of the American Dust Bowl. Featuring over 300 photographs from renowned FSA photographers and local amateurs alike, this illustrated history explores the Dust Bowl in an unprecedented way. The stories are heart-wrenching and terrifying; it was a time when static charges in the air shorted-out cars, when men avoided shaking hands for dear of shocks that could knock a person down, when there were 14 million grasshoppers per square mile ad 850 million tons of topsoil blown away in one year. Burns and Duncan conducted interviews with more than 130 people and scoured private letters, published accounts and newspaper articles to produce a document t hat may likely be the last recorded testimony of the generation that lived though the defining era. To be published alongside a documentary of the same name.