Staff Pick: Ken Burns' The Dust Bowl

Using his established formula of photos, film footage, music, and interviews (including some very affecting recollections by those who lived through it), the documentarian, Ken Berns, 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.

The Dust Bowl 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 Bowl, a four-hour, two-episode documentary from acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns, is also a morality tale about our relationship to the land that sustains us—a lesson we ignore at our peril. If you like to check this DVD out, you can find it in our online catalog by clicking here.

-Julie