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Dust Bowl, usA: Depression America and the Ecological Imagination, 1929-1941. By Brad D. Lookingbill. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. xii, 190 pp. Cloth, $44.95, IsBN 0-8214-1375-9. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-8214-- 1376-7.)
Brad D. Lookingbill's book is the first post-- modern history of the dust bowl of the 1930s. As such, it is not concerned with topics typically encountered in studies of that event such as the environmental causes or consequences of the dust storms, their effects on social life within the Great Plains, or federal agricultural policy. Instead, the book takes as its subject the very language that the dust bowl inspired. Lookingbill is interested in textual analysis.
The author considers a wide variety of texts. These include photographs by the Farm Security Administration, paintings by Alexander Hogue, Pare...