Dust Bowl Diary

"Life in what the newspapers call 'the Dust Bowl' is becoming a gritty nightmare," Ann Marie Low wrote in 1934. Her diary vividly captures that "gritty nightmare" as it was lived by one rural family-and by millions of other Americans.

The books opens in 1927-"the last of the good years"-when Ann Marie is a teenager living with her parents, brother, and sister on a stock farm in southeastern North Dakota. We follow her family and friends, descendants of homesteaders, through the next ten ye...