Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
I can't resist commenting on the huge irony in this tale of pioneers. I meant to cite a passage about the plow cleaving the land as a metaphor for transforming the prairie, and also reference some of the imagery about the cultivated fields that surrounded them, but I neglected to highlight them. As it turned out, those tough, ancient prairie grasses that caused such difficulties to the earliest settlers were vital, and those straight, straight furrows were a disaster in the offing. Without the grass to hold it down and curved lines to surve as a brake, all that fertile topsoil would blow away in another thirty years. The dust bowl, which has been called the worst man-made disaster in American history, was caused by such agronomic geniuses as Alexandra.
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This irony was very much in my thoughts too and may have influenced the way I read the book. Last month I read
The Grapes of Wrath for the other book club, which is about a family that chose to leave the land behind and head to greener pastures in California. However, I also read
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan which wove together the real stories of different towns and families who refused to leave their land and stayed behind during the Dust Bowl years. This book was very impactful on me. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2006. As a result, the land as an evolving entity, the knowledge of the future to come, and the relationship of each character to the land (both what they did to the land and the force that the land had on them) was very much at the forefront of my mind.