The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

by Dr Piers Brendon (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $4.32

  The author offers an overview of the 1930s, a story of the dark, dishonset decade that determined the course of the 20th century. Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan and Russia - the reader is taken through ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil, when Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope and modernity 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, the American Dust Bowl, to the Tokyo earthquake, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, this book brings the 1930s back to life. The leaders are examined - Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - in the context of their age and also through a chronicling of contemporary experience to give a sense of what it was to be living then. The Dark Valley investigates how, and how far, contemporary minds knew what they knew, and the extent to which our own view of the time is fogged by their uncertainty. It aims to illuminate a period when the world was struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another.

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $24.04

  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.