The Great American Dust Bowl written and illustrated by Don Brown. Houghton Mifflin, 2013. 9780547815503. Includes a selected bibliography and source notes that include a few stunning photographs.
I recently ordered every one of Don Brown’s nonfiction graphic novels from my local library system, and this is the best of those I hadn’t read before. Brown includes geology, history, and weather to explain the context for the start of the Dust Bowl, and then presents fourteen dusters (dust storms) in 1932 in a few quick sketches. It’s a perfect introduction to the chaos the dust creates in the later pages as it falls like “chocolate snow,” damaging everything in its path, suffocating people and animals, and burying the land as it darkens skies across the country.
Brown gives a sense of the scale of what happened, of the carry-on effects as well as the toll they took on people. And he cites his sources! Brown continues to be a model for everyone who writes graphic nonfiction.
