Pimlico 2001. Paperback, xviii+701 pp.
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.