Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Tags: high plains

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
by Timothy Egan
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... (more)
Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains
by William Ashworth
The story of a crucial, dwindling natural resource: an invisible ocean of fresh water under the Great Plains. The Ogallala aquifer contains enough water to fill Lake Erie not once but nine times over, and it stretches from Texas to South Dakota, from Colorado almost to Nebraska. Every year, five trillion gallons are pumped out for irrigation, and if the aquifer went dry (or, more accurately, when it goes dry),... (more)