The Dark Valley - Softcover

Brendon, Piers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712667148 ISBN 13: 9780712667142

Publisher: Pimlico, 2001

Synopsis

Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark, dishonest decade - child of one world war and parent of the next - that determined the course of the twentieth century.

Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, The Dark Valley brings the 1930's back to life through meticulous scholarship.

Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-Tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then.

About this title

Review:

"Dark Valley" as a phrase was coined first by the Japanese to refer to the desperate years of chaotic depression that followed the 1929 slump. But, as Piers Brendon's epic history of the same name vividly demonstrates, it was apt to describe any of the world's leading nations--the crippled, traumatised European powers, a moody, solitary US, Stalin's outcast Russian Soviet and volatile, upstart Japan--of the time, with varying degrees of severity and fascinatingly contrasting outcomes. With no dishonour to those who endured the unspeakable traumas of the First World War, reading Brendon's scholarly tome leaves little scope to argue with the assertion, made by Leon Blum, amongst others, that the economic crisis and its effects were as traumatic as the "war to end all wars". Worse was to come, for sure, but the events that led to the "chasm" of the Second World War still boggle the mind--from our safe distance it is difficult to comprehend that this actually came to pass, yet at the same time the whole era seems to be engulfed by a fatalistic air of inevitability. In many ways, the insane dance of rampant ideological forces and economic desperation unleashed across the sphere make for the more gripping history, and in Brendon's hands the cast of thousands is skillfully evoked while the facts are judiciously evaluated in a rolling narrative through the tribulations of the era. This is first-class historical writing, but certainly not for the faint-hearted. --Alisdair Bowles

Review:

"A fantastic, sweeping history of the 1930s... Brendon is a superb writer, taking an exceptionally complex, dense topic and building a compelling narrative." (John Stepek Money Week)

"The best history book I've read since Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy... Wonderful and enthralling" (Ruth Rendell Daily Telegraph)

"Brilliant, cinematic, utterly illuminating... No other historical account I know can rival this... Masterly" (Valentine Cunningham Financial Times)

"A delight to read, a literary triumph sparkling with moments of real humour and compassion" (Richard Overy Sunday Telegraph)

"Piers Brendon's long book has such brilliance and narrative power, and contains so much fascinating detail, that reading it has all the excitement of novel" (John Grigg Evening Standard)

About this edition

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0712667148
• ISBN 13: 9780712667142
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 752