Sunday New York Times Acrostic - The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

Virginia Postrel recently wrote on Depression Chic:

If anyone should fear a Depression, it should be journalists, who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers. But instead, they seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship--without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s. (We're all yuppies now.) The Boston Globe's Drake Bennett asked a bunch of people, including me, what a 21st-century Depression might look like. The results sounded pretty damned good to some people--a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators.

But Depression Chic has even infected the Crossword section of the New York Times, with the selection coming from the book "The Worst Hard Tiime: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl" by Timothy Egan. Egan won a National Book Award for this book.

When the dust fell, it penetrated everything; nose, throat, kitchen, bedroom. Well, the eeriest thing was the darkness. People tied themselves to ropes before going to a barn just a few hundred feet away, like a walk in space.

I prefer doing this puzzle on paper, but I did this puzzle using the Java applet version. Getting the word "eeriest" in the grid was a little tricky, and I bit on the last word being "peace" instead of "space." I read in some blog somewhere that a good way to remember that Polk was the eleventh President of the U.S. was to think of eggs - add one more yolk to Polk and you have a dozen, so I actually knew that.