It blighted parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, and over half of Kansas. In 1933, there were multiple dust storms that lasted seventy days. In 1935, it stripped away an estimated 850,000 tons of good topsoil, the same year that it drove 250,000 people from their homes. The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told, until now.

In The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan put the environmental disaster of the Dust Bowl at the center of a rich history, told through characters he brought to indelible life. Now he performs the same alchemy with the Big Burn, the largest-ever forest fire in America, a tragedy that cemented Teddy Roosevelt's legacy.