The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (2005, Hardcover)

Sitting Bull saw it coming. As he predicted, the land exacted a terrible vengeance on the "Wasichu" (white man) who brazenly violated it. They had decimated the Plains tribes and penned the survivors in reservations. They had hunted the bison (once 30 million strong)almost to extinction and introduced cattle in their place. So far, so bad. But then--Bada bing!-- the "Wasichu" committed a much worse act of aggravated stupidity, an act that brought down on them the full fury of nature.
Greed led them to it. When the price of wheat soared during WWI, farmers ploughed up huge swaths of the prairie, feverishly ripping up the "sea of grass" that alone protected the topsoil from the merciless winds and recurring doughts. After the war, when the price of wheat dropped and kept dropping, the farmers reacted by ploughing up ever more of the prairie. Then, in 1930, the winds picked up speed and stamina, the sky dried up, and it barely rained for the next eight years.
The story of those eight years is brilliantly told by Timothy Egan in "The Worst Hard Time." The book is a worthy companion to John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" and John Ford's movie adaptation of the novel. To read "The Worst Hard Time" is to unearth a time capsule revealing a place and time where the soil literally flew away and then rained back down, where people died in droves of "dust pneumonia," where some were reduced to eating yucca roots and pickled tumbleweeds, where swarms of grasshoppers descended on the fields and ate everything but the fence posts, where winter snow fell in black flakes and hailstones came coated in mud. More than a million people on the Plains became refugees, hitting the road as hoboes or "Oakies" bound for the false paradise of California.
Nature's power to be, like the Hindu god Kali, a life giver or a death dealer, manifested itself unforgettably on Black Sunday, May 4, 1934. What happened that day was like a sequence from a science fiction movie or a Biblical cataclysm inflicted on Egypt. Dust clouds rose so high that airplanes had to climb to 15,000 feet to avoid them. The formation of dust clouds blanketed the Midwest and roared on to the East Coast, plunging New York and Boston into partial darkness and covering ships that were 200 miles from shore.
It was the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history. The Great Plains--"breadbasket of America"--a region covering parts of ten states, had been transformed into a semi-wasteland where, one farmer siad, "You don't have to die to go to hell.
"The Worst Hard Time" is an absorbing read on a subject that, in an era of global warming, could hardly be more timely or relevant to the fate of the earth.