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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | 978.032 BRO | Young Adult | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A speck of dust is a tiny thing. In fact, five of them could fit into the period at the end of this sentence.
On a clear, warm Sunday, April 14, 1935, a wild wind whipped up millions upon millions of these specks of dust to form a duster--a savage storm--on America's high southern plains.
The sky turned black, sand-filled winds scoured the paint off houses and cars, trains derailed, and electricity coursed through the air. Sand and dirt fell like snow--people got lost in the gloom and suffocated . . . and that was just the beginning.
Don Brown brings the Dirty Thirties to life with kinetic, highly saturated, and lively artwork in this graphic novel of one of America's most catastrophic natural events: the Dust Bowl.
Author Notes
Using resonant storytelling and evocative art, Don Brown shares with his readers the excitement, humor, pain, and joy of lives lived with passion. His work has been called "pacesetting," "carefully crafted," "compassionate," and "forthright." He lives in New York with his family.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The tale of the decade-long drought that laid waste to American plains and ruined the lives of countless farmers is a somber read, but Brown (America Is Under Attack) devotes himself to telling it well, enhancing his expertly paced panels with graphs, text boxes, cutaway views, and extensive quotations from those who endured and survived. He explains how ranchers failed on the plains ("Cattle lacked the sturdiness of bison, and the summer heat and winter blizzards wiped them out"), and how the farmers who replaced them were bamboozled into thinking they could do better on the same ungiving land. WWI inflated wheat prices, the end of the war sent them crashing, and then the drought hit. Brown resists overstatement; a lone farmer's puzzled look up at the sky is more poignant than any frown. Only the physical descriptions of dust storms pall as later passages revisit details covered earlier. In the end, Brown ties the story of that catastrophe to the one that faces the country now: "In 2011, scorching heat came back and the rain disappeared." Readers won't miss the point. Ages 12-up. Agent: Angela Miller, the Miller Agency. (Oct.)? (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
A speck of dust is a tiny thing. This simple opening line creates a perfect counterpoint to the chaos pictured on the page: a terrifying dust cloud rears up like a creature out of a nightmare, scattering birds and jackrabbits in its wake. Its a portent of things to come in this bleak yet compelling glimpse at the Dirty Thirties. After a lengthy drought and rampant overplanting, the once-fertile soil found across the Great Plains states had become pulverized earth by the early 1930s. High winds created black blizzards so powerful that during one storm enough dust to fill 1,500 modern supertankers blew eastan accompanying illustration shows the giant ships floating out from a grubby-looking brown cloud. Speaking of which, the color brown is a recurring theme here, as Brown relies almost entirely on shades of brown throughout. Consequently, the book has a rather drab look; thankfully, Brown crisply paces the narrative with fascinating glimpses of the sociological and geological causes of the Dust Bowl. Primary source material is also sprinkled in liberally, as characters speak directly to the reader, documentary-style: It made the awfulest noise, that dirt did, a driver says as he speeds away from an enormous and ominous dust cloud. Brown has utilized comic book elements before in his excellent nonfiction picture books, so no surprises here: this is a solid nonfiction graphic-novel debut. Appended with a selected bibliography and thorough source notes. sam bloom (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Concise and clear in imagery, text, and layout, Brown's (Henry and the Cannons, 2013) nonfiction examination of the Dust Bowl contextualizes its genesis in geological and cultural history, the dynamics of its climatological presentation, and the effects on both the landscape and Depression-era High Plains farmers. The pen-and-ink artwork, digitally painted in burnished and dusty brown and yellow hues and the shock of blue that comes with the rain that eventually clears the air is combined with swirling text, along with well-researched and minimally descriptive explanations and occasional speech balloons attributed to anonymous residents and observers. The brevity of this presentation heightens rather than diminishes its power to evoke the history, and an ample list of resources provides plenty of opportunities for further research. A closing photo of the 2011 dust storm in Arizona emphasizes that the Dust Bowl wasn't an isolated incident. This is a complete visual package, from the whirly, mud-colored cover design through the sudden reintroduction of color only after the dust storms abate. The Dust Bowl, as experienced by its survivors, truly comes to life in this compelling look at an important moment in American history.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN HIS GREAT poem "Don't Cry, Darling, It's Blood All Right," Ogden Nash skewers the notion that children want to read books that are comforting and sweet: "Hard-boiled, sophisticated adults like me and you/May enjoy ourselves thoroughly with 'Little Women' and 'Winnie-the-Pooh,'/But innocent infants these titles from their reading course eliminate/As soon as they discover that it was honey and nuts and mashed potatoes instead of human flesh that Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Women ate." Published in the 1951 collection "Parents Keep Out," Nash's poem might as well be discussing the 21st-century child: tastes haven't changed so much as they have diversified. Once children had to sate their bloodthirsty natures with fiction; now the trend in nonfiction is to bring them history at its most dire. This season, Don Brown and Nathan Hale use impressive artistry to recount two of the American West's most infamous tragedies in graphic-novel form. And yes, little children, there will be blood. In the more serious of the two, "The Great American Dust Bowl," Brown uses pen, ink and then a whole ocean's worth of digital brown paint to explain how America's heartland became, in the 1930s, a vast barren plain. Brown eschews easy answers and instead offers readers a variety of causes including the destruction of the bison, a farming boom followed by a postwar drop in wheat prices, drought, the Depression and, finally, dust itself. Beaten-down farm folk populate Brown's pages, describing their experiences during the Dust Bowl years. "It made the awfulest noise, that dirt did." Brown provides meticulous credits for these quotations in the book's source notes, but leaves the speakers nameless and, in his minimalist drawing style, almost faceless. Freezing winters, boiling summers and bugs "so thick and so bad that you could swipe handfuls of them off the table and still have more" made the farmers' everyday lives virtually unbearable. By the time Brown describes people suffocating to death in the dust storms, readers are staggering under the sheer weight of relentless human misery. Yet while Brown's narrative focuses on extreme woes, there's something curiously undramatic about his illustrations. It's as if he wants to rein in the atrocious elements of his story even as he brings them to light. You come to wonder if his reluctance to heighten the action with more exciting pictures is part of a refusal to sensationalize. Even a farmer running to escape a black cloud, who recalls thinking "it was the last day of the world," wears an expression of mild distress, as if he had a bit of a cramp in his side rather than the gut-wrenching fear of an approaching storm said to contain enough static electricity to power New York City. "Donner Dinner Party" is, as it boasts, "dire and disgusting, but a testament to the human will to survive." The book is the third in a series with an inherently ridiculous - though entertaining - premise. Nathan Hale (the historical figure, a spy during the Revolution) has been given the gift of seeing America's future. While waiting to be hanged, he tells tales to his hangman and the British provost marshal in order to postpone his inevitable death. The two previous "Hazardous Tales" - "One Dead Spy" and "Big Bad Ironclad!" - were set during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Hale now moves on to the tragedy of the Donner Party, a group of emigrants who left Illinois for California in 1846 and were forced to spend the winter in the Sierra Nevada, where about half of them died and some are said to have resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. For those readers who assumed the horrors of the Donner Party began and ended with the conspicuous consumption of human flesh, the spate of attacks, murders and other tragedies along the way will come as a surprise. One notable aspect of this book - aside from the graphic-novel format - is how Hale tackles the actual eating of people. It's clear that to the hangman (a childlike figure who is a perfect stand-in for young readers), the prospect of eating pets to stay alive is more unnerving than the idea of eating people. You can eat 65-year-old Jacob Donner, sure, but don't you dare take a nibble out of Towser the pup ! The end of the book yields fascinating facts, including a grid showing who died, who survived, the causes of their deaths and whether or not they were cannibalized. There's also a flow chart tracking how likely you, the reader, would be to survive the trip based on your age, sex and the size of your family. Because Hale's books are full of imagined dialogue, they can't be strictly categorized as nonfiction, but there's clearly plenty of research behind them. He addresses this question directly in a section called "Correction Baby." ("If you've got questions, comments or corrections, she's got answers !") As to whether James Reed, one of the emigrant party, was as wacky as he is depicted in the book, Hale says, "I think our portrayal of Reed is cartoony, but fair." It's probably safe to assume that holds for most of the history here. Of the two graphic novels, Brown's is clearly more dedicated to using strictly sourced facts to weave an accurate historical narrative. Hale, on the other hand, is happy to jump back and forth in time, using the characters of Hale the spy, the hangman and the provost marshal to keep things lively. And while Brown does his best, most children will probably prefer Hale's blood-soaked adventures over Brown's careful and grim account of an environmental catastrophe. Nash knew this, writing with prescience: "Therefore I say unto you, all you poets who are so crazy about meek and mild little children and their angelic air,/If you are sincere and really want to please them, why just go out and get yourselves devoured by a bear." How likely would you be to survive the Donner Party, based on your age, sex and the size of your family? BETSY BIRD is a librarian and the author of the picture book "Giant Dance Party." She is a co-author of "Wild Things! : Acts of Mischief in Children's Literature," to be published in April 2014.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 5 Up-Brown once again dives into American history, this time telling the story of the Dust Bowl in his first graphic novel. Starting with a tale of a terrifying 200-mile-long duster in 1935, he works back to explain what caused the devastation and its decadelong effects on the economy, the land, and the people. Brown's illustrations bring these facts to life, showing the severity of the tragedy; it's one thing to read about globs of mud falling from the sky like rain, it's quite another to see them painfully pelting a herd of cattle. The drab and beige colors add to the emotional impact and bleakness of each situation, as does Brown's sketch-heavy art style. Comic panels vary beautifully from full-page layouts of vast fields of nothing but dust and devastation to multipaneled action shots, such as an airplane falling out of a dust-filled sky, that instantly create a dramatic and tense mood. The graphic-novel format works well, but the addition of speech bubbles to deliver quotes seems awkward, since characters end up saying things like, "I thought it was the last day of the world" while actively fleeing from a disaster. The quotes are needed; some just seem out of place. Ending with a dismal warning about the potential of similar future disasters, Great American Dust Bowl is a magnificent overview of this chapter in U.S. history. Pair it with Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997) and Matt Phelan's The Storm in the Barn (Candlewick, 2009), both of which are more entertaining, but Brown's book is more informative.-Peter Blenski, Greenfield Public Library, WI (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A graphic-novel account of the science and history that first created and then, theoretically, destroyed the terrifying Dust Bowl storms that raged in the United States during the "dirty thirties." "A speck of dust is a tiny thing. Five of them could fit on the period at the end of this sentence." This white-lettered opening is set against a roiling mass of dark clouds that spills from verso to recto as a cartoon farmer and scores of wildlife flee for their lives. The dialogue balloon for the farmer--"Oh my God! Here it comes!"--is the first of many quotations (most of them more informative) from transcripts of eyewitnesses. These factual accounts are interspersed with eloquently simple explanations of the geology of the Great Plains, the mistake of replacing bison with cattle and other lead-ups to the devastations of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The comic-bookstyle characters create relief from the relentlessly grim stories of hardship and loss, set in frames appropriately backgrounded in grays and browns. Although readers learn of how the U.S. government finally intervened to help out, the text does not spare them from accounts of crippling droughts even in the current decade. From its enticing, dramatic cover to its brown endpapers to a comical Grant Woodesque final image, this is a worthy contribution to the nonfiction shelves. (bibliography, source notes, photographs) (Graphic nonfiction. 10 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
