Out Of The Dust Critique

The Worst Hard Times by Timothy Egan conveys the story of farmers who decided to prosper on the plains during the 1800s, in places such as Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. They decided to make living, and some stayed during the worst droughts in the United States in 1930s. High temperatures and dust storms destroyed the area, killing animals and humans. This competently book reveals the prosperity for many, later revealing the time of the skinny cows. The story is based on the testimonies of the survivors or through their diaries/journals and on historical research. The author describes the struggles of the nesters, in which Egan clearly blames these catastrophic events on the settler’s hubris.

In the novel, Of Love and Dust, Ernest Gaines discuss means of love in the story which help give readers a look into the interracial relationships between some of the characters in the novel. There is conflict between the couples who are encountered by the reader which hints at love between a white man (Sidney Bonbon) and black woman (Pauline Guerin), as well as a black man (Marcus Payne) with a white woman (Louise Bonbon). Although the love between Sidney Bonbon, the overseer of the plantation, and Pauline Guerin, who happens to be Bonbons mistress, is not clear in the beginning of the novel, it becomes more obvious as Gaines strike up a love interest in

The "dirty thirties," as many called it, was a time when the earth ran amok in southern plains for the better part of a decade. This great American tragedy, which was more devastating environmentally as well as economically than anything in America's past or present, painstakingly tested the spirit of the southern plainsmen. The proud folks of the south refused at first to accept government help, optimistically believing that better days were ahead. Some moved out of the plains, running from not only drought but from the new machine-controlled agriculture. As John Steinbeck wrote in the bestseller The Grapes of Wrath, "it was not nature that broke the people-they could handle the drought. It was business farming, seeking a better return on land investments and buying tractors to pursue it, that had broken these people, smashing their identity as natural beings wedded to the land."(pg. 58) The machines, one-crop specialization, non-resident farming, and soil abuse were tangible threats to the American agriculture, but it was the capitalistic economic values behind these land exploitations that drove the plainsmen from their land and created the Dust Bowl.

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

According to answers.com, a dust bowl is a region reduced to aridity by drought and dust storms. The best-known dust bowl is doubtless the one that hit the United States between 1933 and 1939.

The Dust Bowl affected children in a big way by ruining their health, and causing them to see extricating things. “The children of the Dust Bowl saw things that no one, no matter what their age, should see. And they are as capable as any witness of telling those things with devastating directness.”(Williford) This analyzes that the children had seen things that in today's life, other children could not handle

Though most everyone has heard of the Dust Bowl, many people don’t actually know what it is. “When rain stopped falling in the Midwest, farm fields began to dry up” (The Dust Bowl). Much of the nation’s crops couldn’t grow, causing major economic struggle. "The Homestead Act of 1862, which provided settlers with 160 acres of public land, was followed by the Kinkaid Act of 1904 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909” (Dust Bowl). This caused many inexperienced farmers to jump on this easy start of a career. Because of this, farmers in the Midwest had practiced atrocious land management for years. This included over plowing the land and using the same crops year after year. In this way, lots of fertile soil had gotten lost. This helped windstorms gather topsoil from the land, and whip it into huge clouds; dust storms. Hot, dry, and windy, almost the entire middle section of the United States was directly affected. The states affected were South

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.

The printed work of the Dust Bowl written by Donald Worster tells of the devastating man-made events that occurred between 1929 and 1939. Worster described this time in history as the darkest moment life in the southern plains encountered in the twentieth-century (4) which was a time where drought, poverty, and famine were of concern. Worster also ties the Great Depression with the Dust Bowl and said that the same society produced them both because of the weakness of America (5). He strongly believes that the Dust Bowl was not a disaster created by nature, but a crisis created by man due to capitalism. Dust Bowl gives a powerful stance on how man ignored the limits of the land which led them into the dirty thirties; however, his beliefs cause him to disregard the disaster as the fault of nature, and specifically blamed man.

Daughters of the dust revolves around an early 20th century African American family from Ibo Landing which is a time not shy of racism and slavery, especially in middle America. The scene depicted in the movie where a young girl is running through the forest in an all-white dress with a blue ribbon who seems to be being followed by a man in a hide and seek manor. The young girl disappears and the man stumbles upon a plot of land that is a graveyard, with headstones made from wooden planks, the man observes his surroundings. Presumably, this girl in white is the young voice narrating the next scene which pans through steam over to a flash back of the ancestors who were slaves. We look across a field of men and women who are working over these steaming wells, as well as the people in the background hanging soaked sheets up to dry. We see these people mixing over a steaming hole in the ground scraping around a grey paste. The workers then begin to pull the paste out of the steaming pits and scrape it into wooden molds. They appear to be making cement blocks as a young boy watches and older man collect all the wooden brick molds and systematically knocks the brick from the mold and piles them orderly on both his left as well as his right. While doing so he sings an old hymn, the boy seems to enjoy watching this process. Throughout the entire scene, there is a narration of a girl which speaks

Have you ever heard of the dust bowl? The Dust Bowl is a tragic eight years of endless drought and dust storms that never end. The book Out of the Dust captures the Dust Bowl tragedies very accurately, but is still a fictional book. Out of the Dust is a story of a young girl named Billie Jo. Billie Jo is an 11 year old when the Dust Bowl starts. The Dust Bowl by Jan Meyer is about the affects the Dust Bowl took on people, especially the farmers like Billie Jo’s Dad and Joe De La Flor. Out of the Dust is historically accurate because the author, Karen Hesse, includes details about the terrible dust storms and extreme loss of livestock.

In what was one of the most fertile areas of the United States, one of the Nation’s worst agricultural disasters occurred. No rain came so crops did not grow, leaving the soil exposed to the high winds that hit the area in the 1930s. Stretching over a 150,000 square mile area and encompassing parts of five states—these being Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico—the Dust Bowl was a time where over 100 million acres of topsoil were stripped from fertile fields leaving nothing but barren lands and piles of dust everywhere (Ganzel). While things were done to alleviate the problem, one must question whether or not anyone has learned from this disaster. If not, one must look into the possibility that the United States may be struck

" The dust Bowl Odyssey" written by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle. Tells the readers of a story not too different from "Mirror with a memory" also written by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle. The concept and story line portrayed in this book discusses struggles of many early American citizens, the life as well as hardships that was endured, the poverty, worry and hopelessness that was lived. Interestingly enough I my self not being born a citizen of the United States of America look at the booming business industries and the housing industries which gives a portrait of a thriving economical system. But reading the "Dust Bowl Odyssey" allows me along with other readers to understand that although America is a successful and thriving country it is not without its sacrifices.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck uses numerous literary techniques to advocate for change in the social and political attitudes of the Dust Bowl era. Simile, personification, and imagery are among the many devices that add to the novel’s ability to influence the audience’s views. Moreover, through his use of detail, Steinbeck is able to develop a strong bond between the reader and the Joad clan. This bond that is created evokes empathy from the audience towards the Joads as they face numerous challenges along their journey. The chapters go between the Joad’s story and a broad perspective of the Dust Bowl’s effect on the lives of Mid-western farmers in which Steinbeck illustrates dust storms devastating the land, banks evicting tenant

The Dust Bowl, a series of severe dust storms in the 1930’s, left the southern plains of the United States as a wasteland. The storms occurred due to the lack of use of dryland farming techniques to prevent wind erosion. Powerful winds would pick up loose soil and carry the sediment around the countryside. Called “black blizzard” or “black rollers”, these storms had the potential to black out the sky completely. Due to the inability to grow and sell crops, banks evicted families and foreclosed their properties, leaving them homeless and without an income. The author of The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, wrote his American realist novel to allow readers to understand the experiences of the migrants from the Dust Bowl era. Not many