In the history classes of our Junior High yesteryears, we learned of a vague sometime called the Dust Bowl era. Amid the doodles in high school textbooks, we looked at Harry Eisenhard photographs of weathered American nomads in frayed coveralls, traversing rippled sand dunes and bent against gale-force winds. We gazed at surreal images of an inland hurricane known as Black Sunday. For English classes, we were force-read John Steinbeck's fictional account of the Joad family's dispirited attempt to escape time and place, having lost faith in the American Dream and seeking only some vocational foothold for the simple sake of survival. From lousy 78-RPM recordings Woody?Guthrie nasally singing soulful tunes of the period's despair?"So long, It's Been Good to Know Yuh."?

For those of us born after the 1930s, those various reckonings gave us a glimpse of the Dust Bowl days (years, actually?1930 to 1939), but no true sense of the hardships and suffering they imposed on the landscape and people of the southern plains. We understood its place in history, but only to the extent we understand and acknowledged wars long past or cataclysms globally distant. Enter Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time (2006). The book brings us stark reality and a sense of horror about a region sand- and dirt-blasted and desiccated not so very long ago. It brought Egan the National Book Award.

The Worst Hard Time expertly, very readably chronicles the ecological disaster that was the Dust Bowl. More so, it provides authentic, mesmerizing insight into the lives and misfortunes of people, mostly nesters, who stayed for various reasons and endured that protracted drought, caused in no small measure, as time and wisdom bore out, by the government-prompted settlement and unsustainable, endorsed agricultural practices. The narrative is a spellbinding history lesson. The lesson is, in several regards, a story of grit.

In a bygone time, the Dust Bowl circumscribed most of the historic southern bison herd's grassland range, extending from southern Nebraska into the Llano Estacada of Texas, and west to east from southeastern Colorado to central Kansas. Portions of the Oklahoma panhandle and New Mexico were included, but the drought and 50 miles-per-hour dust storms in the "bowl" had ecological and economic impact throughout the nation. At first, Easterners were reluctant to believe reports of the devastation. But a storm in 1934 dumped 12 million tons of dust on Chicago, New York and Washington, DC. Ships 300 miles off the Atlantic Coast were covered in finely ground soil particles. There were no disbelievers thereafter, and worse was yet to come.

Egan notes that meteorologists have rated the Dust Bowl as the number one weather event of the 20th century, and historians report it as the nation's worst, prolonged environmental disaster. It coincided, not coincidentally, with the Great Depression.

The history of the Dust Bowl, the convergences of mostly unwitting human actions, government policies and propaganda, and weather are train-wreck fascinating. Egan provides a masterful overview of the time and circumstances. His penchant for the occasional flowery superlative doesn't distract or detract from an absolute wealth of information made dramatic by the accounts of nesters who held their ground and sanity while both eroded.

There is too much history in the book's 340 pages to surround here, and nearly all of it is nicely referenced. But two things need to be mentioned. First is Black Sunday, April 14, 1935. It featured a roiling cloud thousands of feet high and, according to one observer, "like three midnights in a jug." Wind speed at the top of the turbulence was estimated at 100 miles per hour and 40 to 60 mph on the ground. Temperatures in the van of the "moving mountain of dirt" dropped as much as 30 degrees in an hour or two. Visibility went to zero. It was a terrifying, relentless, monstrous, choking, blinding wave that swept the entire region. Some people caught outdoors collapsed, unable to orient themselves, were unable to be seen or heard, and choked to death or were forever blinded by the fire hose blasting of dirty air. Those indoors fared only moderately better. Animals, wild and domestic, were found dead by the hundreds, their stomachs and lungs filled with dust. The likes of the dust storm of Black Sunday had never been seen before and has never been seen since. However, readers learn that dust storms, catastrophic dust storms but of lesser magnitude were frequent visitors of the Dust Bowl. Dozens, maybe hundreds of dusters, "black blizzards," struck the plains during the era. The Black Sunday nightmare was merely one, but it was the worst.

By the end of the ?30s, an estimated 100 million acres had been "lost," and the probability that the Dust Bowl landscape could ever recover was bleak at best. Enter Hugh Bennett. That's the second thing I am compelled to mention. Bennett was a career government man, a product of the soil-eroded south. He was an optimist, a consummate crusader, a visionary and the first Director of the Soil Conservation Service. And he had a plan. The book makes it clear why Dr. Bennett is acknowledged today as one of the nation's foremost conservation heroes.

I highly recommend this book. Like Egan's The Big Burn, reviewed a few months ago, The Worst Hard Time reads like a novel, and it isn't easy to set aside until finished. Readers inclined towards fiction will learn stuff in spite of themselves. Consider yourself warned.

Houghton Mifflin published the title, under the Mariner Books label. Now in a paperback edition, The Worst Hard Time can be purchased for $14.95.