I would recommend this book because it is a page turner once you get involved in the book. I had mixed opinions about this book because I found the start to not be very exciting, but after a little while once the Joads got moving on the road to California it became a lot more intense. The family faces many hardships along the way such as losing family members and also having two die, but they also meet many new people. The main idea of this book was family because no matter how bad it was Ma was able to keep the family composed. There were many characters throughout this book and I like a few of them, but I didn’t like a few of them. I like Ma, Tom, and Casey because the way they acted and how they were involved in the family made them seem like real people. It was almost like I was listening to someone tell this story to me firsthand. I did not like Pa and Grandpa because they did not seem to fit into the family completely, Grandpa was too stubborn for the family, and Pa did not know how to keep a family composed. The plot is the main reason why the story was so amazing, it all seemed to flow together. John Steinbeck writes with a depressed tone at the start, but as you read more of the book the tone gets happier and also more hopeful.
The story touches on things such as poverty, alcoholism, bullying, abuse, etc. It is an extremely eye-opening, humbling book that shows you that you can change your life around no matter how you were raised. This book is relatable to many people, including children and teenagers who are or may have gone through some of the same things that Jeannette and her siblings did. The theme that most resonated with me while reading the book was alcoholism. It is something that has been a part of my family life for a long time.
Timothy Egan called the Dust Bowl "the worst hard times As the nation was hit with its worst economic disaster, the country was hit with its worst ecological disaster as well. Over 300 dust storms or dusters hit the Southern Great Plains during the 1930s. The hardest hit areas were theOklahoma and Texas panhandles. The land became almost uninhabitable, and over two million people left their homes throughout the course of the dust bowl in search of a new life elsewhere. Many ended up nearly starved to death and homeless.
Devastation pervaded the decade of the 1930s, which left many people struggling with hardships. High unemployment and homelessness rate preceded the nation. This destruction became known as the Dust Bowl. During the Dust Bowl, high winds referred to as the black blizzards wreaked havoc on the land. A principal, infamous author, Donald Worster, demonstrates in his book, “Dust Bowl The Southern Plains in the 1930s” the living conditions and obstacles people had faced along with the various explanations for the Dust Bowl.
Donald Worster is an environmental historian and his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s helped to define the environmental history movement as it was the first environmental history book published. He breaks the stereotype of how the Dust Bowl was viewed by writing it from an environmental standpoint instead of writing a social history by focusing solely on the people and their experiences. How it helped to define the environmental history movement is that it opened up this avenue for others to write about environmental issues. He is also an anti-capitalist and this book combines his interest in the environment with the effect that capitalism has on the environment.
The poem Of Mice and Men has many symbols that refer to the life of people during the Dust Bowl. The whole poem tells the life of when the men had to handle to get a job and survive. The poem refers to how if you get fired, it is very hard to find another job. It was like this because during the time of the Great Depression, people did not need to have a ton of workers because of the new supplies. Also, there was not much to farm.
Eight Months in the Dust Bowl One group of ninth graders was put to the task of surviving one winter, 240 days, in the dust bowl with limited food and water. During this eight months the group of four, two males and two females, had only one cow, one bull, 500 bushels of wheat, and 500 gallons of drinkable water. This group decided that the best way to survive would be that every person would get 2.6 gallons of water to last them 5 days and after that five days pass each person would get an additional 2.6 gallons.
Causes of the Dust Bowl How would one feel when there is millions of tons of soil, dust, and dirt in the air? It would almost be as if one couldn’t breath and there is no oxygen around oneself. This deadly situation occurred to many people in Colorado, Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.
The Dust Bowl didn’t just appear out of thin air; It has various reasons for its creation. The Dust Bowl’s reasons for why it started were mostly cultivated by a mix of drought and over farming. The eroded soil stirred up in the high winds and smothered the Great Plains. (History.com Staff) Americans had the philosophy of manifest destiny and many made the choice to migrate west. Farmers moving to the Great Plains and over farming accounted for a part in the creation of the dust bowl.
Dust Bowl and Economics of the 1930s The Dust Bowl was a very desperate and troublesome time for America. The southwestern territories were in turmoil due to the arid effect of the drought causing no fertile soils. As the rest of America was being dragged along with the stock market crash and higher prices of wheat and crops since the producing areas couldn't produce. This was a streak of bad luck for the Americans as they were in a deep despair for a quite some time.
The Dust Bowl was a huge catastrophic event that happened during the Great Depression throughout the United States. The dust bowl actually took place from 1930 to 1939, and is known as “The Dirty Thirties”. There are many different factors that contributed to the cause of the dust bowl. The dust bowl did not just happen one day.
The Black Blizzards sweeping the plains of the 1930’s, better known as the Dust Bowl contributed to the extreme economic downturn of its time. These giant dust storms were caused mainly by a combination of environmental factors and human actions. In turn, these oversized storms caused many people to suffer from loss of crop, and eventually, forced innovation of farming techniques. Back in the “dirty thirties”, years 1934 to 1937, an extreme drought and the lack of strong root systems in the soil, causing wind storms, and the loss of crops. Dirt swirled into dense dust clouds, so dark you couldn't see through them.
The Dust Bowl received its name in April 35, 1935, the day after Black Sunday. Robert Geiger, a reporter wrote: “Three little words achingly familiar on a Western farmer’s tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent – if it rains.”. It was also one of the worst disasters for its time. The depression lasted from 1930 to 1941, and it impacted the poor, such as delaying marriages, dropping the birth rate and many children became sick and ill.
The 1930s was a defining decade in America's history it was a test of the nation's strength and resulted in many changes, both good and bad. One of the many challenges America faced was the disastrous dust storms in the southern Great Plains. In the years before the dust storms began, farmers cleared the land of the grass in order to plant wheat when the drought came the wheat failed, resulting the Dust Bowl ("Dust Bowl 1931-1939" 3). These storms caused the greatest migration in U.S. history, with about 2.5 million farmers and their families leaving the plains ("Dust Bowl 1931-1939" 3). The Dust Bowl was an enormous struggle that resulted in many economic and agricultural problems that were going to be extremely strenuous to fix.
The worst man made ecological disaster in American history; The Dust Bowl. During The Great Depression, jobs, money, and food were scarce it forced the farmers to over work the soil because there was very little money and food them. So,they had to plant more crops to make ends met. But they did not realize that they were braking up the dirt creating the dust bowl.
“With the gales came the dust. Sometimes it was so thick that it completely hid the sun. Visibility ranged from nothing to fifty feet, the former when the eyes were filled with dirt which could not be avoided, even with goggles ”( Richardson 59). The Dust Bowl was a huge dust storm in the 1930s that stretched from western Kansas to New Mexico. People that lived in that area could not step outside or they would get dust in their lungs.