I fight the dust that blows into my apartment from the Qatari desert, but reading this book humbled me. And gave me vicarious asthma. Having just watched the PBS documentary about the Dust Bowl, I had bleak visual images to take with me into this book, but the narratives astounded me more. The numerous dust pneumonia deaths, the tenacity of people who refused to leave. The piano player who lost a depressing war of financial attrition, the Texan optimist and newspaper man who founded the "last man club". The story of the dust bowl is essentially a regional apocalypse. That people lived off pickled tumbleweed and lived in holes in the ground is sad, but the big picture tragedy is worse: Despite the heroic efforts of Hugh Bennett and a the too-late intervention of the earnest FDR, the warnings of scientists were brushed under the rug by Hoover and his predecessors, and the land was voraciously torn apart by misled, opportunist farmers and greedy bankers. When the price of grain went up, the "shelterbelt" trees the public works program had planted were torn up. The Ogallala aquifer was discovered and tapped to help the drought, and is now being rapidly depleted. The land has still not recovered. My bleak feeling at the end of this fascinating piece of history is that despite a few tenacious sorts and a few earnest activists, the Dust Bowl is likely a prelude of our world to come.