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Journal Reflections on a Dust Bowl Tale
Out of the Dust -- the Depression in Adolescent Poetry
It is difficult to think of this work as too dark for young individuals, even middle school children, because of its emotional truth and absence of sensationalism. It is written in the poetic voice of an articulate young women about concerns many young people face in real life, namely that of death of a loved one, guilt, and also coping with physical accidents. Moreover, the death of Billie Joe's mother is not gratuitous, or merely a death for sensationalism's sake. The book shows the effects death of a young person's main maternal figure upon a family and a great historical economic crisis, that of the looming Great Depression in the Dust Bowl of Midwestern America. The historical context of the novel gives an added importance and weight to the mother's death and the family's suffering, as individual readers learn about how the Depression affected family life as well as simply the sorrow the protagonist feels...
Thus, from a historical perspective as well as a personal and psychological perspective, the work's darkness is justified. It uses a potential point of 'dark' association to draw individuals into the world of the poem cycle. Potentially bereaved individuals in the classroom can also take comfort in the fact that they are not alone, that children all through American history have lost loved ones and survived.
Question 2
Billie Joe is immature at the beginning of the poem cycle, despite the eloquence of her words in conveying to the reader, with spare and vivid free verse, the relationship between different family members. After being forced to assume greater emotional and practical responsibilities after her mother's death, and losing her ability to play music, she begins to understand what has happened and take on the significance of her mother's death and the larger phenomenon of the Dust Bowl, as it affects other families over the course of the family.…
Work Cited
Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. New York: Scholastic 1997.
Dust Bowl Bibliography Annotated Bibliography Bonnifield, Matthew Paul. The Dust Bowl: Men Dirt and Depression. University of New Mexico Press, 1979. A journalist named Robert Geiger first coined the term Dust Bowl in the 1930s, which was a decade of extreme droughts, blizzards, tornadoes, dust storms and other climatic changes. Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Kansas and other Plains states bore the brunt of this drought, and Dr. Bonnifield lived through it at the time.
Although the 1930s as a whole for all farmers were marked by dramatic periods of "boom and bust," for the residents of the Triangle, the periods of "boom" were far shorter and crueler (McNeill 40). Indeed, when "Captain John Palliser first reached the prairies he was said he thought he had "discovered Hell" because the region was so arid and desert-like. Still, Palliser noted "a fertile belt surrounding the
They are used for the same reasons farmers depleted the soils in Oklahoma in the 1930s, which was to produce a surplus of crops in the hopes of making bigger profits. Many of those consequences are long-term and might not be noticeable for at least one generation into the future. I think the Dust Bowl situation is interesting because the consequences of poor farming practices did take many decades to
S. history. He has held teaching appointments at Brandeis University, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Maine. He serves on the boards of several environmental organizations. His publications include An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (1994); The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (1993); Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977); and A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley
Environmental Themes in Grapes of Wrath This essay reviews environmental themes from the following five books: Dust Bowl by Donald Worster, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Killing Mr. Watson by Peter Matthiessen, and River of Lakes by Bill Belleville. This paper discusses the role that culture has played in environmental issues during the past century. Five sources used. MLA format. Environmental Themes Humans
On the other hand, in the Dust Bowl evidence, photos and statistics play a very important role, because they paint a graphic picture of what was going on in the country and how people were suffering. This type of evidence plays a much more important role than in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which was not so much about photographs and statistics, but about print documents and even the political