Ken Burns' 'The Dust Bowl' review

Sunday's part one traces the roots of the catastrophe, while Monday's part two covers the land-saving efforts of FDR and, in particular, the so-called "next year people," so named because they always expected (or prayed) that rain would arrive the following year. It finally did, but not before a decade-long plague of dust, rabbits, grasshoppers and death.

"The Dust Bowl" has all this along with an iconic American landscape under an impossibly vast sky that periodically becomes choked with a gray-black monster. But this isn't just a man- against-the-elements story, but man against the elements he partly created. The filmmakers have located the perfect protagonists as witnesses: plainspoken Heartland archetypes, deeply wizened now, who look into the camera and recall distant events with such clarity and power that they seemed to have happened just yesterday. Burns and Duncan even find their ideal muse -- Caroline Henderson, a long-ago writer for the Atlantic, also a dirt farmer, whose elegiac words give the human and ecological tragedy a Homeric cast. "Before sun and rain," she wrote, "we all stand upon one common level."

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