Book Review: The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History

The blackest days...

A very telling comment from one of the survivors of the Dust Bowl was that the dust got everywhere in their home and it was impossible to stop it blowing in. Homes are rightly regarded as safe havens once inside the front door, an escape from the outside world except in a dust storm. Those years in the Thirties must have been extraordinary times for the thousands who lived on the southern Plain States.

Ken Burns' documentary makes these years come alive with plenty of archive news film, photos and spoken commentary from people who witnessed it all (I've seen a few clips). Unfortunately I didn't think the book looked as good as it should using some of this material. The text certainly captures the period but is set in rather large type suggesting that maybe this title was aimed at the educational market. There are far too many snapshots of people and families. To the people in these photos, of course, they are precious memories and in Burns' documentary he has the luxury of having a rostrum camera pull into a photo and then pan across the faces suggesting movement even though it is a flat photo. In the book they are static on the page. The quality of the photos throughout the pages varies enormously, too dark, too light or badly framed but that is the nature of amateur snapshots.

The way the photos (especially the family ones) and graphics have been used is very bland and unimaginative. Ones that are poor technically but nevertheless have something to say are large and overpower some that are full of detail but small. Graphics like newspaper cuttings and maps are too small for the reader's benefit (a map on page 208 is so small as to be useless). The best pages are the twelve chapter openers where interesting photos run right across a spread.

If only the book's editorial presentation had been as creative as the documentary this would have been a fine visual history that really captured the feel of those terrible years.

The Dust Bowl: An Illustrated History is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

The book's endpapers.

The first four spreads in the book use strong powerful photos and captions to sum up the Dust Bowl.

Badly cropped photo of a building that seems to be falling over. This is such basic stuff to correct but it hasn't been done.

All of the chapter openers have strong dramatic photos that really catch the eye.

Lettering left on photo and the other photo has part of the photo-album frames left in.

Left-hand page photo, not saying too much, is far larger than the one with plenty of detail on the right-hand page.

Top of the left-hand page are the lyrics to Woody Guthrie's song 'Dust Bowl refugee' just too small to read.

The map (bottom of the left-hand page) is far too small to be of any bemefit to the reader. Yet more family snaps fill up the spread.

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