Book Summary: Out Of The Dust By Karen Hesse

I believe the book fever, 1973 is about overcoming hardship. In the book Mattie over comes death loss homelessness and the fear of the unknown . Mattie is 15 years old living with her mom grandfather and there cook Eliza when fever hits Philadelphia killing thousands.

Detailed Description of Setting: This story takes place in Flint and Grand Rapids, Michigan, during the middle of the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a really bad worldwide economic recession throughout the 1930’s, which caused high unemployment for adults and homelessness for many children. Bud “not Buddy” Caldwell is the main character and is a ten-year-old African-American boy who lives in Flint, Michigan. Bud has been staying in orphanages and several foster homes since his mother died four years earlier when he was six. Bud never knew his father. The few items Bud has left to remember his mother are a bag of rocks, a photograph of his mother as a child and fliers that show Herman E. Calloway and his jazz band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. He keeps them in an old suitcase. Bud thinks that Herman Callaway is his father and goes “on the lam” to try to find him. He meets many people and gets into many adventures along the way. Eventually, his journey leads him to Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the jazz clubs where Herman and his band play.

Timothy Egan writes the book The Worst Hard Time. In the book, it has a build up to how the Dust Bowl occurred, and it explains the effects of the Dust Bowl through families that were in the plains. Then to the end of the book, things are starting to turn around when Franklin D. Roosevelt visits the Great Plains. Timothy Egan’s thesis is that from the beginning, the whole United States starts to tip the balance of the Great Plains, which led to the Dust Bowl, and the people hitting rock bottom; however, two opposite ideas come together with faith that the Great Plains can be rebalance. Egan writes in an inspiring tone that gives a feeling of understanding how the people felt in the worst time, and he stays on topic of his main point but is slightly bias.

The dust bowl was a tragic time in America for so many families and John Steinbeck does a great job at getting up-close and personal with one family to show these tragedies. In the novel, “The Grapes of Wrath”, John Steinbeck employed a variety of rhetorical devices, such as asyndeton, personification and simile, in order to persuade his readers to enact positive change from the turmoil of the Great Depression. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck tells the fictional narrative of Tom Joad and his family, while exploring social issues and the hardships of families who had to endure the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Steinbeck’s purpose was to challenge readers to look at

The Dust Bowl was a difficult time that caused people to lose their lives or to have difficult ones. People got diseases, others lost everything they had, and kids didn’t get to grow up normal. One of these kids was Timothy Johnson. One day, he and his brothers were out when their mom called them in, as she did a loud sound crashed through their trees. They heard the stories of many dust storms forming but Timothy hadn’t known how they would affect his life. They watched as dust clouded around them, they couldn’t even see the tree Timothy and his brothers had played by. Days later after the first storm, Timothy went back to school and talked about it with his friends. A few days later at school another one hit, and all the kids had the realization of what was happening. About 6 months later kids would wear masks and many had gotten illnesses from what was now know as the Dust Bowl. Timothy grew up a lot during the Dust Bowl, he went through many hardships and learned what to do to help out his family. After, he wrote a documentary about it later becoming famous for the perfect way he portrayed it. Yet the story of Tim was only one of many caused by the Dust Bowl, an awful time that destroyed many lives.

Imagine living as a motherless farmgirl during a time when horrendous dust storms would occur. Not only do you not have a mother and are living in a terrible environment, but at the same time, you are living during The Great Depression. Billie Jo Kelby in, “Out of the Dust” by, Karen Hesse, had to deal with these painful events as a teenager. She has been in a terrible accident that took her mother’s life and scarred Billie Jo forever. To make matters worse, Daddy is so heartbroken by his wife’s death, that he can’t talk about it with Billie Jo and the two almost separate from each other until Billie Jo runs away but then comes back and reunites with Daddy. Billie Jo is friendly with the people she loves, sorrowful

Born to poor cultivating folks in 1933, Joycelyn Elders experienced childhood in a rustic, isolated, neediness stricken pocket of Arkansas. She was the eldest of eight youngsters, and she and her kin needed to join work in the cotton fields from age 5 with their ordinant dictation at an isolated school thirteen miles from home. They conventionally missed school amid harvest time, September to December.

One of America’s most beloved books is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The book portrays a family, the Joads, who leave Oklahoma and move to California in search of a more prosperous life. Steinbeck’s book garnered acclaim both from critics and from the American public. The story struck a chord with the American people because Steinbeck truly captured the angst and heartbreak of those directly impacted by the Dust Bowl disaster. To truly comprehend the havoc the Dust Bowl wreaked, one must first understand how and why the Dust Bowl took place and who it affected the most. The Dust Bowl was the result of a conglomeration of weather, falling crop prices, and government policies.

According to Egan, “Never let the kids see you sweat” (2006, p.1). The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan was announced as “a classical disaster tale” by the New York Times. This book was written to inform everyone about the untold story of those who survived the American Dust Bowl. The story documents how the darkest years of the Great Depression affected the economy and the people’s living environment as well. Egan’s book explains the importance of the Great Depression. Within this theme, Egan explores the struggle of survival and the broken promises made by the government.

In the book one of the most noted families known for being hit during the Depression were the Cunninghams. The first sign of struggles

The story Dust Bowl by Donald Worster describes the environment as well as first person experiences to give a detailed description of the Great Plains during the thirties which led to the Dust Bowl. He uses accounts from people's memories of the dust storms that swept across the plains that destroyed farm land and homes. Not only is there people’s memories but historical facts of the environment at the time. For example how farmers misused the land as one key factor to the Dust Bowl along with many years of drought and dryness as the other major factor. Overall the book gives a great full picture of the time period and detailed description of the Dust Bowl.

In the book, Out of the Dust, written by Karen Hesse, readers can experience the many emotions of a teenage girl coming of age in the harsh climate of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. The novel is historical fiction, written in first person and free verse poetry. The main character, Billie Jo writes of her turbulent time from the ages of 13 to 14 years, in the form of journal entries. Each entry is titled and broken down into seasons rather than specific dates. There are several themes repeated in the story, such as forgiveness, escape, healing and hope.

In the detailed story of an impoverished family during the late 1900’s, Jeannette Walls describes her experience from the young age of 3, up until adulthood. The family of 6, with Rex Walls as the father, Rose Mary as the mother, and her three siblings, Lori, Brian and Maureen, were constantly moving throughout the country with little to no food or cash. The memoir shows how dysfunctional the family was, but never seemed to force the reader to condemn the parents. In a life of poverty, the have to move for own to town, and often lived in various mining towns. Although they each found something they learned to love (like Jeannette’s rock collection) in the desert, they had to leave them behind once Rex’s alcoholism only worsened, and they ran

In the book Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse, it shows how a girl and her family had been affected by the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl had destroyed their crops leaving them with little to no income. The Dust Bowl caused hardships that they had to experience and work through. I am going to explain how Billie Jo’s piano playing is tied to other good and bad things in hers and the families life. Her piano playing is positive in the beginning, separated in the middle, and rediscovered in the end.

Born in 1897, William Faulkner was born into a traditional southern family in Mississippi. Throughout his career, Faulkner chronicled the effects of the Great Depression in the postbellum South with his short stories and novels. Following an era of excess and luxury, the Great Depression revolutionized the life of Americans living in the southern states. The economic turmoil brought on by the recession increased existing racial tensions and heightened the disparity between the upper and middle classes. Although it takes place approximately forty-five years prior, allusions to the Great Depression can be seen throughout William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” in the racial and social clashes between Abner and the surrounding community, along with the lifestyle of the Snopes family.