ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A DUST BOWL BOOK: After reading John Marshall’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer review of Timothy Egan’s new book about the Dust Bowl of the thirties, I plan to spend my Christmas holiday hunkered down with it. My parents’ families in Denver lived through those dark days. They were city folks, but the wind and the dust and the breadlines and predatory bankers affected everyone. I didn’t used to believe my mother’s tales of receiving Christmas presents of one apple and one potato. I discovered later that she was lucky to have that. The Shay and Hett families didn’t feel the displacement experienced by the Okies in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. But the memories live on in those who fled and those who remained, the ones that Egan says were “the people who stayed behind, for lack of money or lack of sense, the people who hunkered down out of loyalty or stubbornness, who believed in tomorrow because it was all they had in the bank.'' One of the book’s surprising facts is that some two-thirds of the Dust Bowl residents fit that category. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl is published by Houghton Mifflin.
