In a time of drought and economic depression in 1934, Ella Barron runs her boardinghouse in Texas while caring for her son, Solly, and responds to the calm influence of one of her boarders, David Rainwater, while facing the tension and uncertainty around her.

Texas. 1921: A time of abundance. Elsa Wolcott meets Rafe Martinelli and changes the direction of her life. Her only choice: marriage to a man she barely knows. 1934: Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, must make an agonizing...

Facing his share of ordinary challenges, from local bullies to his father's failed expectations, eleven-year-old Jack Clark must also deal with the effects of the Dust Bowl in 1937 Kansas, including the rising tensions in his small town and the spread ofa shadowy illness.

"When a rainmaker is bludgeoned to death in the pitch-blackness of a colossal dust storm, small-town sheriff Temple Jennings shoulders yet another burden in the hard times of the 1930s Dust Bowl."--

Draws on reports, newspaper articles, and interviews to chronicle the American Dust Bowl, providing photographs to illustrate the catastrophe as well as offer a tribute to man's relationship to the land and his ability to persevere.

"The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people who held on have never been fully told. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod homes to new framed houses to huddling in basements with the...

Chronicles the Dust Bowl of the 1930s through interviews with survivors, dramatic photographs, and rarely seen movie footage.

Most people have at least seen a snowstorm on television, but imagine a storm of dust instead of snow. These were called black blizzards in the Dust Bowl, which was the name for the Great Plains of the United States during the 1930s. Readers will learn what transformed green farmland and lush grassland into a disaster area, forcing thousands to leave, and finally how the land was restored."--Provided by publisher.

"From "America's best novelist" (The Denver Post): A sprawling thriller drenched with atmosphere and intrigue that takes a young boy from a chance encounter with Bonnie and Clyde to the trenches of World War II and the oil fields along the Texas-Louisiana coast. It is 1934 and the Depression is bearing down when sixteen-year-old Weldon Avery Holland happens upon infamous criminals Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow after one of their notorious armed robberies....