Today I am linking up to Book Beginnings hosted by Rose City Reader where readers share the first sentence of the current book they are reading.
The Wanderer
"They had been on the road for six days, a clan of five bouncing along in a tired wagon, when Bam White woke to some bad news. One of his horses was dead. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of flat tire, except this was the winter of 1926. The Whites had no money. They were moving from the high desert chill of Las Animas, Colorado, to Littlefield, Texas, south of Amarillo, to start anew."
I recently learned of The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan from The Relentless Reader, Jennifer's fantastic book blog, and thought this would be an interesting and also educational read. I immediately downloaded it and am looking forward to delving deeper into the stories that will be told. From the introduction, the reader senses the weariness that the character is feeling and the direness of the family's situation to propel them to journey across The Great Plains with nothing more than hope for a better future. This is a book with heavy content but one that is sure to be inspirational.
About the Book (from the New York Times): The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Timothy Egan’s critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect.
About the Author: Timothy Egan is an American author and journalist. For The Worst Hard Time, a 2006 book about people who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in history/biography. In 2001, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series to which Egan contributed, "How Race is Lived in America". He currently lives in Seattle and contributes opinion columns as the paper's Pacific Northwest correspondent.
Have you read The Worst Hard Time? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Happy Reading,
Rebecca
