It was a decade-long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions.; It was the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.; It was an epic of human pain and suffering. The story of the Dust Bowl is also the story of heroic perseverance. In this riveting chronicle, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns capture, in words and pictures, the profound dram of the American Dust Bowl. Featuring over 300 photographs from renowned FSA photographers and local amateurs alike, this illustrated history explores the Dust Bowl in an unprecedented way. The stories are heart-wrenching and terrifying; it was a time when static charges in the air shorted-out cars, when men avoided shaking hands for dear of shocks that could knock a person down, when there were 14 million grasshoppers per square mile ad 850 million tons of topsoil blown away in one year. Burns and Duncan conducted interviews with more than 130 people and scoured private letters, published accounts and newspaper articles to produce a document t hat may likely be the last recorded testimony of the generation that lived though the defining era. To be published alongside a documentary of the same name.