Nonfiction offers personal, painful tales

Dust in the wind
As the generations that survived it slip away, America's collective memory of the 1930s Dust Bowl has faded; unlike the Great Depression, it's all but slipped from popular consciousness. Timothy Egan's "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl" (Houghton Mifflin, $28) paints a vivid picture that sounds like something out of a horror film.

One woman wakes in the morning to find her white pillowcase colored completely brown from dust, except for the outline of her head. The dust builds up in the lungs of babies, who die of "dust pneumonia." Even inside a farmhouse, men cannot see their own fingers. The storms are unpredictable and unstoppable, and it must have seemed like the end of the world was indeed nigh. Egan explains the actual cause of the storms; due to overzealous stripping of the land, the ruined topsoil could no longer cling to the earth. He mixes the science behind the disaster with a look at the government's scramble to decipher what was happening to the plains, and what could be done about it.

That's all good information clearly presented, but read this book for the personal stories. Egan tells of a young mother's desperate fight to keep her infant alive; of a Texan who forms a "Last Man Club," vowing to never leave the plains no matter how deeply the dust may bury him. The book's cover is eerily evocative of its contents: A translucent jacket depicts the billowing clouds of dust, while the hardback cover itself pictures two hard-bitten farmers, all but invisible behind the rolling, surging fury.    —G.F.C.

Behind the baby carriage
As a culture, we’ve become inured to the obnoxious behavior of the rich and famous.  But their clueless extremes still make for juicy reading, and Suzanne Hansen’s “You’ll Never Nanny In This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny” (Crown, $22) serves up steaming dish on some of Tinseltown’s most ridiculous parents.

Hansen, just nineteen when she moved to Los Angeles to seek her fortune as a child-care provider, didn’t even know who superagent Michael Ovitz was when she arrived, but she soon learned what he wasn’t: an involved or caring father.  Hansen’s stint in the Ovitz household sounds like a nightmare, but it’s a fun, fast read.  Her prose is accessible, hilarious and sharp, and her story confirms what we all want to believe about the Ovitzes of the world—that they’re miserably dysfunctional prisoners of their possessions who have forgotten how to treat other people (the sequence involving the household’s “Picasso alarm” is inspired).

Hansen is at her best when she’s doing shtick about the weird cheapness of the super-rich or describing, with dry horror, the sight of Sydney Pollack in a purple Speedo.  Later sections covering her work for more humane celebs, and her inner conflicts about the job itself, move more slowly, but overall, it’s a warm-hearted look into two years in the life of (as Judy Ovitz charmlessly called them) “the help.”    —Sarah D. Bunting

The naked truth
Diablo Cody notes early in “Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper” (Gotham, $24) that Minnesota doesn’t seem like a stripping kind of place. Nevertheless, when she moved to Minneapolis at 24, that’s what she decided to do. In an intriguing memoir, she takes the wraps off her experience.

The book is at its best when Cody details a life few people ever experience: how the finances worked, how men treated her, what kinds of women she met, and a host of other things you may never know you were curious about until she tells you. Of course, she also delves into the psychology of sex workers, and it is here that the book occasionally rings false. She’s generally defensive about anyone assuming that something psychological might lead a woman to strip rather than, say, become a dental hygienist. To her, this was a job, not a pathology.

But her own descriptions of how angry she came to feel about stripping suggest more complexity, as does the fact that she herself went from stripping to working in one-on-one peep shows to being a phone-sex operator. There’s a lot going on that Cody isn’t talking about, but as a travelogue through territory that’s unfamiliar to most, it works.    —Linda Holmes

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