The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

This account of the Dust Bowl epoch in the southern great plains by Timothy Egan certainly does make clear what a horrendous loss of lives and property occurred in the "dirty thirties." Tim Egan recently gave an "Author! Author!" talk here in Bend (through our public library) to discuss his book about Edward Curtis. Because his talk was focused on that book, he did not answer questions about his other works. I recently read and posted on Breaking Blue, another historical narrative.
I grew up in Oklahoma until I was 15 so had certainly heard about the Dust Bowl and the migration of "Okies" to California. Egan attempted to personalize these events by interviewing survivors, drawing from diaries, newspaper accounts, and government documentation. The scale of the disaster, caused largely by human behavior really was staggering--millions of tons of dust was blown away. In the process, people died of "dust pneumonia," lost their crops, livestock, land, and way of life. Egan does a good job of painting the plains as the home of bison and Indians, with grasslands that held down the dirt for thousands of years of human habitation. But then came the wholesale slaughter of the bison to deprive the natives of their food source, followed by ranchers who fenced the land, and finally--fatally--by farmers who tore up the grass to plant wheat. So that when the drought came, as they historically always do, and the crops died, there was nothing holding the earth in place. Even when people could get small crops to grow, the hordes of grasshoppers ate everything down to the ground.
The facts and figures are consistently astounding. And a few characters emerge as memorable. But largely I found this book tried to do too much, talk to too many people, and portray too many stories to make it a compelling read. It felt choppy and slow, with frequent shifts in the locale and time frame of the narrative. Egan may well have had his journalistic reasons for such choices, but I have not enjoyed reading his books, unlike those of Erik Larson, who does basically the same genre. Nevertheless, Egan won a National Book Award (2006) for this tome, so it's just my opinion. More detail and positive reviews at Kirkus and the New York Times.

The Fifth Witness

I really like this series by Michael Connelly featuring itinerant lawyer, Mickey Haller (aka The Lincoln Lawyer). Fifth Witness is the 4th major book for this character series--there are posts for 4 other books in the series (Lincoln Lawyer, The Brass Verdict,  The Reversal, The Gods of Guilt). Crime has been slow during the Great Recession (as it came to be known) and Mickey has put himself in the business of helping those whose homes are being foreclosed. There are plenty of clients, some more legitimately victims than others, and then there is Lisa. She is always inserting herself in Mickey's efforts to keep the bank from foreclosing on the house where she is living with her son. When the head of the mortgage department at the bank is murdered, Lisa is arrested. Mickey is convinced that she is being railroaded by the police department, and also that the whole thing may have been a set up by the CEO of the company that contracts with the bank to do foreclosures. It appears he has ties to organized crime and does not want that disclosed in an upcoming merger with a public company that will bring him millions of dollars. There is the usual push to get his client off with whatever strategies work--discrediting witnesses, creating a "straw man" to put reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors, and always trying to stay at least one step ahead of the prosecution. Mickey and ex-wife Maggie continue to dance an approach-avoidance two-step that is complicated by their mutual love for teenage daughter., Hayley. Maggie, as a prosecutor for the county, still considers Mickey's tactics reprehensible. Even his new associate, fresh out of a department store law program, has her doubts. But Mickey wears his blinders so he can live with himself and defend his clients to the best of his ability. In this case, the enemies may be much closer than he thinks.

The Screaming Staircase

Now there's a title that makes you want to run right out and read the book, right?! This is another fun YA book from Jonathan Stroud. I read the Bartimaeus Trilogy a long time back so when I saw this new series--Lockwood & Co-- in e-book format, I grabbed it.
The Problems have come to England--an excess of ghosts of varying levels of malevolence generally causing the shape of life to change. No one goes out after dark--except the children who are still able to sense the ghosts by sound or sight. They are on the defensive front line and Lucy Carlyle, having left her small village agency which just lost 3 agents, has come to London and joined Lockwood & Co. This is London's smallest ghost fighting group--only Lockwood, George, and now Lucy--and the only one without an adult supervisor. They are getting on OK until they accidentally burn down a house while fighting a surprisingly strong ghost. They are being sued and stand to lose the entire business until a new client makes them an offer they can't refuse.
But the murder they uncovered in the fire-related haunting has sinister ties to this new client, whose motives may not be simply to rid his country estate of terrifying spirits. These books are just a kick to read if you enjoy YA and the supernatural. Dive in, and don't forget your rapier, salt bombs and chains to keep the ghosts from getting too close! The e-book also provided a glossary of ghost types and the weapons used to fight them :-)