My poor sense of history set the Dust Bowl as an unfortunate dry spell, a bit of bad luck, somewhere around the Great Depression. In fact, it's the greatest ecological disaster in American history: more than 80 million acres of topsoil destroyed, soil that took thousands of years to develop. At the foundation of this disaster lies market economics, Congress' actions against the American Indians—including the genocide of American Buffalo and the induced settlement of the dought-prone Great Plains — the interests of railroad companies, wheat markets, and the story of America's own poverty. Lured west by a few seasons of great weather and promises of farming utopia, many American workers gave it a shot, had a few years of success, and then a decade of misery, poverty, and death. Egan follows a number of families through the story, where the sense of flour-light powdery black soot penetrates every crack, every poor, clogging lungs and eyes alike. The book itself is rather unrelenting. Excruciatingly detailed at times, it does a great honor for those who survived, and to set the disaster in a social, economic, and political context. Recommended.