Saturday, August 6, 2022

A Dust Bowl Deep Dive: Fiction, Nonfiction, and a Ken Burns Documentary

(from Smithsonian Magazine)

For as long as I can remember, I've had a weird interest in weather, storms, and natural disasters. There's no doubt that reading Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl kicked my curiosity about that particular event up a notch. (My thoughts about the book are here.)


I'd been planning to read more about the Dust Bowl ever since and, as it turned out, 
The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah became the next step. It was the July selection of the Wednesday morning library book group but, unfortunately, I missed the discussion. (At least the carpet installers showed up as promised!)

The Four Winds is a widely popular novel and Kristin Hannah sure knows how to keep her readers turning the pages. Despite the relentless hardship and misery, I could not put the book down. [My thoughts are posted here.] As I read, Hannah's story began to remind me of John Steinbeck's classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, a book I loved back in high school and have been wanting to reread for years. The time was right...

I decided on a read/listen combination of The Grapes of Wrath and selected the audio edition narrated by Dylan Baker. I was surprised not only by how much I remembered from my teens, but also by the considerable historical overlap and multiple plot similarities. The contrast between writing styles, however, was striking.


Steinbeck's novel is so well-written, though it's slower reading than The Four Winds. His detailed descriptions add a pronounced visual element to this work and his characters are so genuine, they're almost real. I especially loved how Steinbeck interspersed short chapters, which provided a glimpse of the bigger picture, with longer chapters specifically about the Joad's experience. What a master! The Grapes of Wrath  won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the National Book Award in 1939. 

There is no doubt Hannah's novel is more accessible to the modern reader. It seemed The Four Winds focused on the difficulties of the time, while Steinbeck, additionally, seemed interested in taking a broad look at the overall hardship and what lead to it. Both novels emphasized humanity within the misery and I was impressed by the strength shown by women in both stories. Ma Joad and Elsa Martinelli were truly the glue, the strength, that held their families together.



The following week, I spent four hours watching a Ken Burns documentary, The Dust Bowl. It provided the historical perspective I needed to better understand its place among other events in early 20th century history. 

The documentary was released in 2012, a time when many children of the Dust Bowl were still around to be interviewed. Seeing them as senior citizens and listening to their memories and stories of those difficult years brought tears to my eyes more than once. This documentary was an ideal follow-up to The Four Winds and The Grapes of Wrath... I highly recommend it.

The DVD was available at the library, but we do not have a DVD player here. I was happy to find it also available for download via hoopla. It counted as two "borrows" toward my monthly allowance.

I've moved on from the Dust Bowl for now, but have a couple more novels left on my list. When the mood strikes again, I'd like to read:

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (Newberry Medal 1998)
I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows

Are there other titles I should add to my list?


12 comments:

  1. As I mentioned in another comment, I am LOVING The Four Winds. It's such a compelling audiobook! The Ken Burn's documentary about the dust bowl is so well done (no surprise there - he's a master!)

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    1. Les - I'm so glad you're loving The Four Winds and agree that listening is the best experience! We're Ken Burns fans, too, and not sure how the Dust Bowl documentary got past us a decade ago.

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  2. I like that you've read a few books on a topic/theme. I really enjoyed Four Winds and feel like I got a sense of what it was like to live during that time.

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    1. Helen - It's been a few years (definitely pre-pandemic) since I did a deep dive into anything and I really enjoyed it. My last deep dive was theSupreme Court ... I read several justice biographies and a couple of other books about the Court in general. We'll see what's next...

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  3. Such an interesting post JoAnn. I love how a certain book gets us hooked on learning even more about the history and the people involved. The Ken Burn's documentary sounds like a good one.

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    1. Thanks, Diane. I don't get sucked into a subject like this very often, but it really is a great experience. The Burns documentary is excellent!

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  4. I read and really enjoyed Grapes of Wrath and like you I really enjoyed the different style Steinbeck mixed in. I want to watch the Burns' documentary and have the Hannah book on my TBR. Both sound wonderful.

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    1. Katherine - The Burns documentary was excellent and you will loose yourself in The Four Winds (but beware, it just so sad!) My sister lists The Four Winds among her favorite books. There's nothing like The Grapes of Wrath though.

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  5. I think you have the Dust Bowl pretty well covered. So did Hannah's take from the master? I'd like to reread Grapes of Wrath. I've only read it once as a student ... and I think it blew me out of my chair ... back then.

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    1. Susan - Yea, I'm good with the Dust Bowl for a while. I suspect many of the migrant experiences must have been universal, so it would have been hard for Hannah to tell the story without including them, but there was a lot of overlap.... the dying babies was a bridge too far for me.

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  6. Yay, I’ve found this post! :)

    You might like “My Antonia” by Willa Cather if you haven’t read it yet. I think of it sort of like a precursor to the dust bowl because of the way the characters in it dug up the prairie to build their farms.

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    1. Lydia - Glad you got here!

      Good point about My Antonia! I loved both that novel and O Pioneers!... several other Cather novels still on my shelf. So many books.

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