Given the natural disasters that have plagued the nation this year, it is perhaps an uncomfortably apt moment to recall the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

		"THE WORST HARD TIME: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THOSE WHO SURVIVED THE AMERICAN DUST BOWL" By Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin ($28)

As Timothy Egan, a reporter for The New York Times, portrays the period in his gripping account, the giant black clouds that choked the drought-stricken southern plains were born of nature and economic comeuppance.

Egan builds his story, appropriately, from the ground up, focusing first on what drew people to this desolate region where Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado meet, and on how "the flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least arable part of the United States was transformed by government incentive, private showmanship, and human desire from the Great American Desert into Eden with a haircut."

Settlers came to the region in the late 1800s for various reasons: for land the federal government was essentially giving away in an effort to populate the country's still wide-open prairies; for the salubrious dry air; and for the security of living in an area recently cleared of Indian marauders.

The homesteaders vowed to prove wrong the pessimists who pointed out that there might be a good reason the plains had been so sparsely inhabited.

With hard work, aided by the one-way plow and tractor, they could farm more land than ever before. And when they planted wheat, the farmers actually made a profit as long as they could cover the equipment loans.

That became difficult to do when a glut of grain and the Great Depression hit, sending many farms into foreclosure.

Almost from the beginning, the land had been giving off ominous, almost biblical warnings it wasn't meant for cultivation.

Following the trail of a few families, Egan describes epic journeys into an inhospitable region where pack horses fell over dead with exhaustion and their owners, on the verge of dying from thirst, would drink the blood from a sow's ear. Arriving at their destination offered little relief.

Lightning storms on a giant expanse of dry grass produced roaring prairie fires that a man on horseback could barely outrun. And the wind never stopped.

One woman remembers her basketball coach keeping his Model T at courtside "to chase balls once the wind got a hold of them."

John Steinbeck conjured a whole generation of people who fled the Dust Bowl, but Egan's portrait gives us stories of the many who stayed put.

In one of the book's many interesting asides, he describes how Germans, who had been lured to Russia by Catherine the Great to serve as a human buffer from the Turks, headed for the American plains when her promise of free land and no taxes was revoked.

In this case, it is understandable why a man like George Ehrilich had trouble leaving. As Egan writes, Ehrilich didn't "flee the czar's army, survive a hurricane at sea and live through homegrown hatred caused by the Great War just to abandon 160 acres of Oklahoma that belonged to him and his 10 American-born children."

Nothing Ehrilich experienced along the Volga, though, could have prepared him for what was coming -- black dust clouds rising almost two miles into the sky and blowing for weeks on end.

At its peak, the Dust Bowl spread over 100 million acres; in a single day (April 14, 1935 or "Black Sunday"), more than 300,000 tons of dirt were swept aloft.

Many of the people who remained behind choked to death. Some smothered in their dugout homes. Others survived, but lost everything.

These losses from the Dust Bowl should not be forgotten, a fate now made a bit less likely, thanks to this immaculately reported book.