Customer Reviews

The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

This is a wonderfully executed study of the many ways in which the social, economic, and political events of the Depression era fostered the world's disastrous descent into the horrors of what became World War Two. Famed British historian Piers Brendon does great credit to this complex and widely varying terrain in his exhaustive and thoughtful coverage of the whole panorama of human suffering and social folly that was the 1930s. As he aptly points out early on in the book, the nations of the world shared much more in the way of common problems and perceived dangers than they recognized, and all too often their individual efforts to extricate themselves meant friction and conflict with their neighbors or/and competitors. Lacking any real appreciation for the ways in which their efforts to rearm themselves in order to demand more of the world's "largesse" for themselves would ultimately doom them all to a war far worse than the horrors so recently visited in World War One, they ambled recklessly toward the cliff of the abyss with no real appreciation for the crushing fall they are about to take.

In this sense Brandon reemphasizes one of the oldest lessons of history; that we need to more fully comprehend the past and what it was like to properly understand the present. In this way, the events of the late 1920s and early 1930s doomed the various nations into a scenario from which all the most likely scenarios ended in international conflict. Of course, the fact that the conflict that eventuates from these internal machinations reached a level of intensity never before witnessed in the modern world hardly occurred to most of the protagonists. Indeed, all of this ground has been covered brilliantly before, and Brendon's considerable contribution in this book lay not in this description, but rather in the painstaking way he so carefully describes the social, economic, and political particulars in each individual nation, and then weaves these accumulated and collated observations into a masterful tale that often is so well-written it seems more like fiction than fact.

The reader is quickly ensnared by his wonderful powers of exposition, and the endless collage of names, places, and events spin by in spell-binding fashion as he masterfully describes a virtual panorama of places, a wide cast of characters, and an era full of fateful events. This was a decade in so many ways spinning ineluctably out of control in terms of the social and economic forces unleashed that may seem hard from our own perspective to understand how it was that no one could either stop it or blunt its impact. Yet it was the very nature of the cultural despair and the dangerous search for political and cultural scapegoats, whether in Berlin, Tokyo, or Moscow, that lent an air of irresistible momentum to the process. Thus, whether referring to Hitler's early popularity based on a program to employ the masses of unemployed Germans, or Stalin's deliberate victimization of millions of Ukrainians, or the unbridled Japanese militarism evidenced in places like Manchuria and China, in each case the popular support and political overtones were cloaked in attempts to gain national resurgence over the absolutely devastating effects of both the terms of the political settlement of the First World War and the Great Depression.

In this sense, this book offers fresh proof of the ways in which the events of the past frame and channel the possibilities for the present and the future. Reading this book leaves little doubt in this reader's mind regarding the lessons history has to teach us all. This is one reason we Americans should be especially aggrieved by the ways in which public school education has slighted the conventional teaching of history in favor of cross-cultural studies. While I am empathetic to the reasons for this change in teaching philosophy, I am even more convinced that so doing represents a critical mistake that leaves our youngsters ignorant of the past, and thus more vulnerable to its painful lessons. As George Santayana said, "those who do not learn from the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them". This is an important and valuable book, and is one I highly recommend. Enjoy!

This highly readable account of the 1930's concentrates on the political and social developments in the big powers of the time. The ground covered is therefore very familiar to the any reader reasonably au fait with the history of the period. Few, if any, new insights are offered, but the writer's style is fluid and easy, thereby providing an entertaining panorama. It is through the incidental detail that the narrative comes to life and the overall flow and colour is such that the volume would be an excellent introduction to the period for a young person seeking an overview of the lead-up to the Second World War. On occasion one cannot but query whether some of the sources have been accepted too unquestioningly by author - is, for example the otherwise mysterious "Cardboard Crucifix" of 1938 a reliable source for details of the Condor Legion's off-duty pastimes, which sound too stereotypical to be true? One would also wish for corroborative evidence, with supporting references, that Britain did indeed used poison gas in colonial warfare (where?), as is here alleged. The gibe elsewhere about military intelligence being a tautology is neither original nor worthy. If the book has a fault it is that in its final section, on the final countdown to the World War, it underplays the importance of British rearmament and of the grim resolution of the mass of the British people. It may be argued that the rearmament process started to late, but it was effective nonetheless, though by the narrowest of margins, and combined with a dogged determination not to submit to Fascist domination, it led to the survival of the free world. This story is the counterpoint to the apparently unstoppable march of the dictatorships. The book is all the poorer by underestimating its importance

Ever since Frederick Lewis Allen initiated the form with "Only Yesterday" in the 1930's, there has been a continuing audience for panoramic histories of decades, centuries and even millennia. Some have been more successful than others--one recalls Eric Goldman's "The Crucial Decade" with special fondness--but anyone familiar with Piers Brendon's previous titles would correctly suspect that he has done the genre justice. (His out-of-print biography of Churchill remains the best one-volume treatment of the Great Man and his "Eminent Edwardians" is a suitable, if more balanced complement to Strachey's acidic put-down of the Victorians). And so he has: sweeping through narratives of events in Germany, the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain, Brendon displays the same writing flair, skewering wit and learning worn lightly that informs his other books. This is a wonderful book of superbly condensed research and entertaining style for a popular audience interested in the "low, dishonest decade."

Amongst historians there is often much debate about how to evaluate history. Some argue that all history should be examined by extant records, others that history is best reviewed through trends, accomplishments, or timelines. Unfortunately, very few historians these days ascribe to the time-tested method of history as a story - the story of the time and of the people involved as recorded by themselves. Fortunately for the reader, Piers Brendon is one of those historians. Brendon, a Fellow of Cambridge and keeper of the Churchill Archives, is an "old-fashioned" social historian; he still believes that history is best related as a story which encompasses all aspects of the human experience; social forces, economics, politics, science, all play their bit parts in shaping the inexorable advance of time. To a reader such as myself who believes that history is a rich tapestry comprising various forces at work, Brendon's The Dark Valley- A Panorama of the Thirties is a treasure; a well researched, well written and objective overview of some of the great events and persons which cast their indelible mark on the 20th century. As noted in the title, The Dark Valley concerns itself with the decade of the 1930's, encompassing social, political, scientific and social themes in an examination of a decade which was to prove pivotal in the development of the world as we know it today. The real triumph of this book is the way in which Brendon is able to tie all of these themes together into an interesting and informative narrative. While the subject of the book itself is full of promise intellectually, it is the measured and talented authorial hand of Brendon which makes this book such an outstanding read: Brendon is masterful at subtly guiding the reader's focus from the great forces at work in history to the experience or observance of the individual.

It is perhaps a very English quality that Brendon's book contains a bounty of dry asides, piquant one-liners and telling anecdotes, but these things bring flavour and life to what otherwise would simply be a story oft-told. Brendon brings detail to sketches where needed to impart flavour and avoids it where it would only bog down the narrative. Many less adept authors would (and have) become bogged down in the minutiae of events of such great and widespread import but Brendon seemingly effortlessly avoids all of the pitfalls while climbing all of the peaks of interest. Perhaps even more important, in this age of "history for a purpose" Brendon remains nobly objective, limiting his authorial voice to the odd interjection of dry wit. This quality by itself makes the book stand out among its contemporaries.

Wether you are an avid amateur historian or tenured practitioner of the art, Piers Brendon's The Dark Valley - A Panorama of the 1930's is a must read. At almost 700 pages it makes for a lengthy read, but like an old friend you'll enjoy going back to it again and again. If more historians wrote this well, and with such care and patience, perhaps the study of history would not be so derided in our ephemeral age. Well worth the price and a necessary reference work for any student modern history.

This is a tough one to review. Yes, it is beautifully written (but keep a thick dictionary at the ready) and yes, it provides dazzling details of the events and men of power during this remarkable era. On the other hand, it is at times cynical and more than a little pretentious. Still, it gives a tantalizing look at almost every national leader (one would hope for more on FDR) and world event, with a reporter's eye for minute detail. Many reviewers marvel at the elegant writing and narrative fluidity, but the attribution of all the troubles of the 1930's to the Great Depression is overly simplistic. But (on yet the other hand) we experience fascinating details of events in Germany, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, Ethiopia, Japan, China, and (far too little) the United States. We also see almost every world leader as a boob or an 'evil one', as Bush 43 would say. We suffer in excruciating detail the gulags and the breadlines, the silly lust for power, the cut of Mussolini's jaw, Chamberlain's insipid fawning over Hitler, etc. No new historical revelations, but an era fascinatingly described. Unfortunately we don't much learn the essential why of it all. But that's not its purpose -- this is a bauble of a book, not an academic analysis of the period. For that, far better to read David Kennedy's 2000 Pulitzer winner of the same general era, "Freedom from Fear". For the 1930's buffs, though, I highly recommend this precisely for its tightly written detail. And there are many spell-binding times for the true gourmand of pre-WWII history and biography. Depressing reading at times, but true to the period. Not a masterpiece of history, but one of the intimacy of the men and the terrible times.

Finally! A book on the 30's that is not dry and academic reading!

Piers Brendon has written an excellent account of the 1930's in this book. The focus is on the major international powers of Britain, France, America, Japan, Germany and Russia; how these countries dealt with the cataclysmic Depression and how their actions became the prelude to the greatest war history has managed to survive. Structurally, Brendon has painted each segment of this decade in a country by country format- giving rise to some events being presented in multiple perspectives. For instance, Germany's Anschluss (the consumption of Austria) is seen through the eyes of every power at least once in the book. I believe that this is a good way of presenting history because it gives historical events greater significance and depth. The one criticism that should be offered is that it can make the chronology of events confusing. Major happenings are do not get confused, however, the minutia of French politics does. I had trouble remembering which government was in power and when. Brendon should have included a timeline at the beginning of the book in order to keep these details straight for those of us who do not possess the supreme command of regional history of the previously mentioned countries that he does. One read-through cover to cover is probably the best way to approach it the first time, and for reference later individual groups of chapters on specific countries will be like gems.

The content of The Dark Valley is very pertinent. As he states in the introduction, the book is not merely intended for historical study, it is "a case study of the global perils lurking at the heart of a major recession. It offers a wealth of past experience on which to base future judgement. And it suggests questions which still demand answers." This, for me, is what history is ideally intended for. On one hand there are the Democracies (Parliamentary or Federal), on the other there are the Dictatorships, some of which were democracies that failed, becoming Fascist, Militaristic, or Communist. Brendon does show how the policies and structure of these governments reacted to the Depression. The collapse of the Weimar Republic into Nazism and America's most extensive peacetime federal mobilization in the form of The New Deal are both presented in clarity- and all mediums between are as well. My favorite chapters dealt with Japan and Russia, for these are usually the most lightly covered topics in this portion of world history. It would have been nice if China took a larger role in this book- but that may have widened the scope just a bit too much.

Some subjects of history that are covered can be fairly controversial- such as Emperor Hirohito's role in Japanese imperialism and aspects of Winston Churchill's final historical standing. Brendon seems to be something of a post-revisionist at times and occasionally a revisionist in whole. For instance, his stance on Hirohito is that the emperor was largely a ceremonial leader trapped in tradition and nearly completely under the sway of a military run amuck. And while I do not profess to be anything nearing an expert on Japan, this seems to run against the typical presentation of history that neglects or disagrees with Brendon's viewpoint. Churchill, conversely, seems to indicate post-revisionism. He states the revisionist view that is overly critical of Winston's 'adventurism' and how it is at times over exaggerated. Whatever stance you do take as a reader, Brendon documented extensively and his ideas and opinions deserve to be discussed.

There is no heavy handed moralizing in this book, and more importantly no apathetic reporting of events. Brendon walks the fine line between neutrality and judgmentalism well, and in the end any 'questions which still demand answers' are remain for the reader to decide. However, it seems that this is a no brainer (obviously the ideal answer to economic hardship and depression, however culture-centric it sounds, is the way of the Western Democracies).

One last piece of advice: when reading this book, have a dictionary close at hand- some of the words are pretty far out. Adumbrate, catafalque, protean, hagiography, incunabula and inculcation are some of the wildest of the exotic words. Don't worry though, it isn't overbearing- it will only increase your vocabulary. Brendon does love the verb 'adumbrate' (to foreshadow); it is kind of strange really. . .

In conclusion, this book is a very good one- I found it both insightful and a good read. If you want an international perspective on the 1930s, I guarantee you that this book will give you just that. My only hope is that Brendon continues through the forties and gives us another good, comprehensive view of a very turbulent period.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author is an excellent writer with a fine sense of character description, much like a novelist. He picks up amusing and telling attributes of major and minor figures in the drama from 1929 to 1939. One criticism, in fact, is that the photos inserted into the book don't depict all these crazy characters like Drax, the British negotiator in the USSR just before the Molotov - Ribbentrop pact -- that is, Britain's last chance to avert WWII. I would've loved to have seen photos of people other than the usual major figures of the time, which readers can find anywhere.
The book leaves you with a lot of speculative thoughts, especially about Britain's appeasement policy. Britain was the superpower of that time -- a weak and over-extended superpower, but really without an equal. Britain's position definitely has echoes for the USA today. France was basically the "sick man" of Europe. So, it was up to Britain, and Britain either failed to lead or led disastrously, depending on how you look at it.
If there was method to Chamberlain's madness beyond politics and vanity, it may have been to steer Hitler's aggression toward the east, at the Soviets. Stalin called his bluff with the Ribbentrop pact; Hitler almost immediately invaded Poland as planned, and the British had to come into the war from a disadvantage.
The author also seers your mind about the disaster that the Great Depression was for the world. A global economic collapse should be #1 on the list of things to avoid for today's world leaders...as it seems to be.
Some of the strongest chapters are the early ones on Japan and later on Japan's foray into China (and what that meant for the civil war going on there). He leaves you wanting to read more about why Japan became so militaristic, a study which seems necessary to understanding post-war Japan as well.
Anyway, great book, highly recommended. The brutality of the period, including less well-known adventures like Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, becomes vivid and tragic. Will definitely pick up others by this author.