Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Don Brown brings the Dirty Thirties to life in this gripping graphic novel account of one of America's most catastrophic natural events: The Dust Bowl.

On April 14, 1935 in Boise City, Oklahoma, the sky turned black as a massive, swirling cloud of dust engulfed the city. "It got so dark that you couldn't see your hand before your face," remembered one farmer. Blinded drivers drove their cars off the side of the road. Terrified cows spun in circles. People covered their faces, gasping for breath. This was one of many dark days during the Dust Bowl. Sick Soil: The Dust Bowltraces the tragic story of...

Offers 12 different views on the environmental disaster that lasted for years. Each page provides information about what happened during the Dust Bowl and how it affected different people, along with interesting sidebars, questions to consider, and historical images.

"In 1974, Bill Ganzel ... went on the road to photograph the aftermath of the Dust Bowl and to interview its victims forty years after the Great Depression. For seven years, carrying copies of [FSA photographs, taken between 1935 and 1942], Ganzel sought the same people and scenes that the FSA workers had photographed."--P.[2] of cover.

In Kansas in the year 1937, eleven-year-old Jack Clark faces his share of ordinary challenges: local bullies, his father's failed expectations, a little sister with an eye for trouble. But he also has to deal with the effects of the Dust Bowl, including rising tensions in his small town and the spread of a shadowy illness

"Paul's family has struggled to make ends meet during the devastating dust storms of the Midwest. When a family arrives in need, Jake must choose between helping the family or saving his beloved calf. A Christmas miracle helps him learn the true meaning of the season"--

Rose keeps a journal of her family's difficult times on their farm during the days of the Dust Bowl in 1935.

The 1930s exodus of "Okies" dispossessed by repeated droughts and failed crop prices was a relatively brief interlude in the history of migrant agricultural labor. Yet it attracted wide attention through the publication of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the images of Farm Security Administration photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. Ironically, their work risked sublimating the subjects-real people and actual...