Product Description
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The Dust chronicles the worst man-made ecological disaster
in American history, when a frenzied wheat boom on the southern
Plains, followed by a decade-long drought during the 1930s,
nearly swept away the breadbasket of the nation. Menacing black
blizzards killed farmers’ crops and livestock, threatened the
lives of their children, and forced thousands of desperate
families to pick up and move somewhere else. Vivid interviews
with more than two dozen survivors of those hard times, combined
with dramatic photographs and seldom seen movie footage, bring to
life stories of incredible human suffering and equally incredible
human perseverance.
The Dust , a four-hour, two-episode documentary from
accled filmmaker Ken Burns, is also a morality tale about our
relationship to the land that sustains us—a lesson we ignore at
our peril.
.com
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Ken Burns gets to the heart of the matter once again with The
Dust . Using his established formula of photos, film footage,
music, and interviews (including some very affecting
recollections by those who lived through it), the documentarian
details one of the grimmest periods in our history--"an epic of
human pain and suffering" that, though relatively recent, is
little known to most, other than by way of some Woody Guthrie
songs and perhaps John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. When
Oklahoma earned its statehood in 1907, it was a land of clear
skies, fertile land, and enough rain to enable farmers to grow
amber waves of grain that stretched for millions of acres. But
with lying real estate agents crowing about the land's
inexhaustible sustainability, the government urging more and more
homesteaders to relocate there, and pretty much everyone ignoring
the fact that the last decade of the 19th century had seen
terrible droughts throughout the region of the Panhandle and
beyond, the land was plowed far beyond its capacity for ing
(the first of the documentary's two parts is entitled "The Big
Plow Up"). And when the Depression arrived and the rain
disappeared, the result was the worst human-made environmental
catastrophe in U.S. history, a decade-long disaster of genuinely
biblical proportions that featured famine, pestilence (having
killed off the coyote population, farmers were visited by a
frightful plague of jackrabbits), disease, wind… and dust. For
most of all, this is a story about dust--the "black blizzards"
that blocked out the sun, carried away the topsoil, killed off
livestock, seeped into people's homes, and found its way into
their lungs, with deadly results. The photos and footage of the
enormous, mile-high dust storms that blew across the
plains--including the one that arrived on April 14, 1935, a day
forever known as "Black Sunday"--are humbling and y. At the
same time, one gains a new appreciation for President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, who marshaled government forces to help out, and
especially the people themselves, some of whom headed west to
California but many of whom stayed on to try to rebuild their
lives. Kudos to Burns and his colleagues, including writer Dayton
Duncan, for illuminating another quintessentially American story.
--Sam Graham