The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s [Hardcover]

Piers Brendon (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2000

A magisterial, unprecedented overview of the clouded and turbulent years before World War II.

It was a decade dominated worldwide by the Great Depression, by unemployment and hardship; a time when human achievement was matched by pervasive fear; when the great neon metaphors of hope that rose up after World War I--Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfürstendamm, the Ginza--grew dim both literally and figuratively. It was a decade during which darkness often masqueraded as light--Hitler's abolition of unemployment in Germany; Stalin's plans for progress and social equality in Russia; Mussolini's "revival" of Italy--while governments established and maintained control through brutal physical repression and the more nsidious, lasting repressions of truth: sanctioned deception and relentless propaganda. It was a decade during which a diffuse economic and social crisis condensed into a massive political and military storm.

Focusing individually on each of the primary staging grounds for history during the 1930s--the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Russia and Spain--Piers Brendon traces the particular and diverse experiences of the decade. Political and economic circumstances form the framework of this breathtaking work of scholarship, but it is also the story of people: both of crucial figures--Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Roosevelt, Franco, Chiang Kai-Shek and Mussolini, to name a few--and of a secondary, but no less fascinating, cast of characters, including George Orwell, Leni Riefenstahl and Ernest Hemingway. Brendon vividly conjures the texture and tone of life in places as far-flung as Paris and Kyoto, Vienna and Shanghai, Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains and Norris in the Tennessee Valley. He depicts the circumstances of the Ukrainian famine and the American Dust Bowl, the Night of the Long Knives and the conquest of Ethiopia, the bombing of Guernica, the Anschluss and the great Soviet purges. He describes the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the books and newspapers they read, the work they did or lacked, the beliefs they held, the pleasures they enjoyed, the sufferings they endured.

The public sphere and the personal realm, the collective lives of nations and the details of individual lives--each element of the book contributes to its brilliant elucidation of the ways in which, during the 1930s, political power obscured knowledge, economic catastrophe darkened understanding and the foundation was laid for the most profound and far-reaching crisis of modern times.

The Dark Valley is a revelation of the ten years that set the course for the remainder of the twentieth
century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 of the time--the crippled, traumatized European powers, a moody, solitary U.S., Stalin's outcast Soviet Union, and volatile, upstart Japan--with varying degrees of severity and fascinatingly contrasting outcomes. With no dishonor 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, among 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, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

Brendon's latest book is ambitious, covering the world's convulsive descent from the economic and political chaos of the 1930s into the global slaughter of the war-torn 1940s. Taking his title from Churchill's address to Stalin on May 8, 1945, Brendon (Hurrell Froude and the Oxford Movement; etc.) analyzes the decade from the start of the Depression to the eve of WWII, a period of economic collapse in the democracies and aggressive totalitarianism in the nations that would ultimately form the Axis. Brendon traces how each of seven nations (the U.S., Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Russia and Japan) responded to the era's economic upheavals. In Germany, Italy and Japan the answer to the Depression was massive rearmament, to which the democracies responded, as Brendon details, with temporizing and appeasement. Brendon is especially interested in mechanisms for distorting the truth, including propaganda and censorship. His writing is superlative, his vocabulary precise and extensive; he displays remarkable talent for the revealing phrase and the polished anecdote. Each of the decade's personalities, from Hoover to Orwell, from Haile Selassie to Harry Hopkins, is pinned down in a trenchant sketch, and the dominant characters, such as Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler, are examined carefully. Most important, Brendon demonstrates why one cannot understand the appalling violence of the Second World War without first mastering the tumultuous decade in which the seeds of the war were planted. 24 pages of photos not seen by PW. Agent, Andrew Best. 50,000 first printing.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 816 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (October 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375408819
• ISBN-13: 978-0375408816
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #382,718 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Explosive Panorama of a Dangerous Time, February 17, 2001

By 

Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (Hardcover)

Piers Brendon's massive work, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930's, is an addictive historical treat. He concentrates on the countries of England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Japan and American as they hurtle towards a war that seems all but inevitable, driven on by the Depression and the growth of militaristic and totalitarian states. The reader will also hurtle through this massive book along with the decade covered on the roller coaster ride the author provides. One of the great charms of the book is the author's ability to select just the right quote from an observer at the time to make the reader feel the events on a personal level. Both the right and left get skewered along the way. The author throws his own opinion in and it is often as keenly observant as his selected quotes. This book is in the marvelous tradition of Barbara Tuchman, particulary her Proud Tower covering the period before the First World War. It is a marvelous achievment and a wonderful read for history buffs. Highly recommended.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An epic book about a dark, dishonest decade, June 19, 2004

By 

Tim F. Martin (Madison, AL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (Paperback)

The 1930s was a "dark, dishonest decade," a time when the nations of the earth were "struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another," one that turned out to be greatest in history. A grim and gloomy time over much of the world, author Peirs Brendon has chronicled in _The Dark Valley_ that decade with amazing detail and an epic sweep. He wrote that the Great Depression - which was worldwide and hardly limited to the United States - was perhaps the greatest peacetime crisis to afflict the world since the Black Death. The old liberal order - which had barely survived the First World War and the Communist revolution in Russia - was nearly annihilated in the 1930s; the Depression ended the Weimar Republic and brought Hitler to power in Germany; fatally eroded the fragile pro-international parliamentary democracy in Japan, replacing it with a racist, expansionistic, militarist regime; brought Mussolini to power, who once in control sought to reap domestic rewards by means of foreign aggression; and completed the isolation of the Soviet Union, wracked by purges and Stalin-created famines. The strength and confidence of the democratic major powers were severely tested as well; Britain experienced a naval mutiny, hunger marches, and even some fascist demonstrations; France was torn by the worst civil conflict since the Commune; and the United States embarked on the most comprehensive and far-reaching peacetime program ever in its history, a nation where the Crash had caused people to be disillusioned with Wall Street and for business to lose its prestige. The democratic countries were divided when they should have been cooperating, guilty of erecting tariff barriers, rival devaluations of their currency, flagging (or in the case of the U.S., non-) participation in the League of Nations, and not presenting a united front to the fascist powers but instead one of appeasement and begrudging military expenditures.

Again and again Brendon focuses on a single thread amidst the tapestry of events he wove, that much of the world was enveloped during that time in something akin to the fog of war. The 1930s was a time of "systematic obfuscation," when governments fought for control of their own population and that of other nations by "manipulating minds and mobilizing opinion." Propaganda and mass media were used to a degree unparalleled in previous history to obscure the truth. Brendon provided many examples of this in his work. In the United Kingdom the BBC presented itself as being objective with regards to British labor disputes but was anything but; instead it presented the view of the authorities, the government approving many of the stories. Mussolini sought to grab the world's attention with daring aviation adventures (such as the crossing of the Atlantic several times by a squadron of Italian aircraft led by Italo Balbo), obscuring the truth that the Italian air force's development was neglected for the sake of these stunts, obsolete and ill-prepared for actual combat. Stalin sought to hide the Ukrainian famine, continuing to sell grain on the international market as if to deny there was any mass starvation in that region, erecting Potempkin villages of apparent plenty for the benefit of Western visitors, denying to outside relief agencies such as the Red Cross that millions had died due to his policies. Leni Riefensthal created masterpieces of Nazi propaganda with her elaborately staged parades and rallies involving elaborate sets, carefully controlled crowds of extras, platoons of cameramen, and novel film techniques like aerial photography, wide-angle shots, and telescopic lenses. Mussolini's agents ruthlessly censored reports of use of chemical weapons in the conquest of Ethiopia, declaring that victims of poison gas instead suffered from leprosy. The _New York Times_ instructed its reporter, sent to cover the French refugee camps that contained several hundred thousand Spanish exiles fleeing Franco's rule, from not filing anything too "sentimental" about the often tortured and starved prisoners, while the French Minister of the Interior, Albert Sarraut, toured the camps and proclaimed them working in perfect order. Hitler for the 1936 Berlin Olympics even had some hand-picked Jewish athletes in order to give a gloss over his fiercely anti-Semitic practices. The depressing list goes on.

The book is thick, at around six hundred pages, covering the history of France, Italy, Germany, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Spain. Many events are covered, including the Dust Bowl, the Bonus March on Washington, the Night of the Long Knives, the Concorde riot, the bombing of Guernica, the rape of Nanking, the Anschluss, the Soviet show trials, Kristallnacht, the Lateran Pact, the New Deal, the Invergordon Mutiny, and the wretched gulags of the Soviet Union such as Vorkuta, Kargpool, Belomor, Pechora, Krasnodar, Karaganda, and those of the Kolyma network, which the author wrote should be etched in memory alongside Dachau and Auschwitz as places of pure hellish torture where people were literally worked to death. Though the decade may seem peaceful when compared to the 1940s, it was one filled with strife - the Japanese invasion of China, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War - which is well covered in this work As grim as the subject matter is, there were still bits of humor in the book, interesting anecdotes, ranging from witty quotations of Churchill to discussion of Hollywood films of the time to other stories (such as that of the man employed to flush all the toilets every day in the Empire State Building so that chemicals in the water would not mar the porcelain finish, as when completed during the Depression the building had only 20% occupancy). The book was quite gripping for the most part though I did find my interest waning at times during discussion of some of the more esoteric aspects of British and French labor relations. A great read, one that will leave the reader begging to read something on World War II, as the book is a great prelude to any study of that conflict.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly Readable Popular History, February 8, 2001

By 

R. W. Rasband (Heber City, UT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (Hardcover)

"The Dark Valley" is highly readable popular history in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman and Will Durant. It's accessible to the non-specialist without being dumbed down. No new ground is broken, but it's written in that British prose that is so impeccable and stylish--witty, profound, and memorable. The chapters on Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia are especially mesmerizing in their horror. The whole book gives a vivid sense of what the stakes were during that terrible decade. Very well done, and recommended for history buffs.