Were you to visit a used book store at any time in the past ten years or so there is a 94% chance you would find a copy of this book on a shelf. (Statistics don’t lie.) Sometimes multiple copies. This title, along with The Da Vinci Code and Plainsong are possibly the three most recirculated used books on the market. Over the years I have considered buying The Worst Hard Time a dozen times or more, but for some reason I never did. Maybe it was the depressing title, or the gloomy photograph on the cover. Even an effusive blurb from Walter Cronkite, once known as the most trusted man in America, could not convince me to pull the trigger. Then a few weeks ago I was in the used book section of our local Catholic Charities thrift shop and there it was, on sale for a dollar. And I thought, why not, it’s for charity after all. So I bought it. Because that’s just the kind of guy I am.
John Steinbeck’s’ The Grapes of Wrath follows a family who fled the crushing poverty and bleak prospects of the American Midwest of the 1930’s. The Worst Hard Time is the story of those who stayed, told from the perspective of people who lived in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, ground zero for one of the worst man-made ecological disasters in human history. That it happened in conjunction with the worst economic disaster in U.S. history makes it all the more remarkable that anyone who lived through it was able to endure. It must have been hell on earth.
The highest compliment you can pay a nonfiction story these days is to say it reads like a novel, the implication being that it offers much more than just the dry facts of a history textbook. The Worst Hard Time is a page turner that lives up to such high praise. My only regret is that I didn’t read it sooner. This one is a winner.
Baseball, Books, Gardening and Beer. 