| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Brad D. Lookingbill. Dust Bowl, USA: Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929–1941. Athens: Ohio University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 190. Cloth $44.95, paper $16.95.

"Stories about stories call attention to disconcerting patterns of probability," Brad D. Lookingbill states. This book considers the ways and the means by which Americans understood the patterns during the Great Depression. Basing his analysis on the theoretical use of myth and language, he concludes that "Depression America conceived the dust bowl as an episode of the frontier" (p. 126). 1

Lookingbill skillfully examines a wide variety of stories told about the dust bowl. Descriptions from newspapers (local and national), church periodicals, magazines, government reports, documentary film, literature, and academia all serve to illustrate the ways in which Americans understood the dust storms, drought, and the deprivation they caused. These stories, he argues, reinforce the metanarrative of American history, mainly that Americans (Europeans) conquered a vast wilderness, closed a frontier, and found a new frontier in dealing with the ecological disaster of the dust bowl, one that could be conquered through the use of rational expert planning and federally coordinated programs. This metanarrative is echoed in the book's structure with chapters titled "Conquest," "Fall," "Adjustment," "Climax," "Survivor," and "Legacies." . . .

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