This book takes place around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. At 50 miles an hour the dust bowl of the 1930's blasted paint off of buildings, soil crushed trees, dented cars and drifted into 50-foot dunes. Children died of dust pneumonia, and livestock suffocated on dirt, their insides packed with soil. Through Bennett, the president Roosevelt came to understand that it wasn't weather or bad luck that created the Dust Bowl: it was man's hubris and ignorance.
