There are a couple of famous photos depicting the Dust Bowl era that I always used when I was teaching because it is one of the aspects of US history that I really think needs pictures to truly appreciate. You can provide all the statistics in the world but when you see a cloud of dust actually bearing down on a city then you understand just how devastating dirt can be - how it can truly destroy land and lives on an epic scale. But still, two pictures aren't all that many and I blew through the Dust Bowl in a matter of minutes because you also have the Great Depression to deal with and WWII is looming large and there was never enough time to look at more or talk about more even though there is so much more to all of it.

Sometimes teaching is all about what you wish you could say and not what you have time to teach (even when your teaching college). We used to talk a little about Steinbeck and a little about Woody Guthrie (everyone knew "This Land is Your Land") but books could be intimidating for my students and so the odds that any of them were going to leave class and read The Grapes of Wrath were pretty slim. I wish Martin Sandler's The Dust Bowl Through the Lens had been available for me to show them back then. They would have found it something manageable - a book they could page through, and read bits of and not have to immerse themselves in. Sandler combines powerful pictures with the stories of the people within them, news reports and quotes from people collected at the time and the stories of the photographers themselves. It's a perfect example of how to do social history in a manner that is both significant and interesting - it's what the term "popular history" is all about and even though the book was published for the 12 &up crowd, it's another example of a teen book that should be selected for adults as well. (Sandler does a great job of explaining the ecological reasons behind the Dust Bowl - you can learn about the loss of topsoil here as well.)

Actually it's a perfect book for adults because it provides so many jumping off points, especially when you don't know before what those points might be.

When Scott Westerfeld spoke at KidLit Con last September he talked about illustrations in books and why they used to be common for both adults and children and how that changed. I think part of what makes most adult nonfiction difficult for some readers is that it is so big and appears to be boring (and some of it honestly is dull but that's a whole other issue). I'm not suggesting we should "dumb down" NF - that is never my goal. But I do think that illustrations & photos would go a long way toward making it more appealing. You want to see what people were seeing, you want to get as close to their experience as possible. Sandler's point is that photography made a big difference in making the country appreciate the Dust Bowl while it was happening and after reading this book you can easily see how that happened but more importantly you are pulled so deeply into the book while reading it that the Dust Bowl come alive for you too. Sandler shows how the same pictures had power today as the 1930s.

Pretty awesome, don't you think?

Highly recommended for all sorts of libraries and all sorts of homeschooling but mostly for anyone who appreciates the power of a picture and words that tell you its story.

[Post title is quote from Ben Shahn, in Dust Bowl: Through the Lens.]