An Interesting Book

I just finished reading The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. Fascinating book. It's nonfiction, which is not my usual reading material. But it's a very engaging, readable account of life on the Great Plains during the Depression and the dust storms that ravaged the area. It includes a description of what happened prior to the collapse of the area and how that helped create the problems to come, as well as how FDR worked to pull the farmers out of their desperation.

While the book is worth reading on its own, what fascinated me are the parallels that you can draw between the times described and some of the world's current events. Like the long-standing American culture of arrogance and flippancy about running ramshod over nature. Like the very rapid damage society can do to the environment. (Sound familiar?)

We never were a society that could learn from our past mistakes...