Critic Reviews

This beautiful and often moving film resonates even more powerfully with Sandy in our rearview mirror, while Burns' favorite theme--the American character--is drawn here with great clarity.

The Dust Bowl, collecting so much oral history that was about to pass away, is a treasure.

The drought-stricken, spirit-sapping Great Plains of the 1930s get the lyrical and learned Burns treatment.

The heartbreak here--especially the cases of poor children who died of "dust pneumonia"--is tremendous. [26 Nov 2012, p.45

Ken Burns' documentary about the "black blizzards" that swept across the Great Plains during the 1930s is at once rigorously sourced and heartbreakingly emotional.

This series is Burns doing Guthrie, bringing a lifetime of experience and craft to bear on a story of people struggling through hard times. He's picking up a guitar and telling us a story--a great one.

Though it has the pokey pace and flat affect of his other films--for Burns, history is elegy--it is also one of his best works: more tightly focused than usual in time and place, with a clear shape, dramatic arcs and a conclusion that is at once cautionary and moving, topical and timeless.

The Dust Bowl sounds like a dry subject, no cheap pun intended, and Burns works hard to humanize it by talking with some of the now-elderly people who made it through.

The story of the Dust Bowl is complicated, twisting together ecology, economics and politics, as well as divisions of class and region, and Mr. Burns and his writer, Dayton Duncan, have done as careful and admirable a job as you would expect in laying it out.

The Dust Bowl is a powerful documentary about what human efforts can achieve and what short-term thinking can wreak.