As a New York Times reporter, Timothy Egan has written memorably about how our impossible dreams collide with the extreme climates and landscapes of the American West - from the fountains that dance before the desert palaces of Las Vegas to the giant ferns that drip and rot in Washington's Olympic rain forest. His last book, "The Winemaker's Daughter," a novel, stumbled with critics, but Mr. Egan is back on firm ground with his fierce, humane account of the dreams and extremes that crashed head on during the nearly decade-long calamity of the Dust Bowl.
David Laskin Review in the New York Times - December 17, 2005
Egan's account of the Dust Bowl era is a final, terrible rebuke to the policies of America's dying days of frontier expansion — when speculators, aided by the government, sold off as farmland grasslands never meant to be turned by the plow. Farmers ripped up the prairie and the wind blew away soil that had built up over millions of years. "God didn't create this land around here to be plowed up," Melt White, who lived through the Dust Bowl as a teenager, tells Egan. "He created it for Indians and buffalo. Folks raped this land. Raped it bad."
Mary Ann Gwinn Review in The Seattle Times - December 23, 2005
Booklist Online Review - December 15, 2005
New Yorker - Books Briefly Noted - February 6, 2006
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