I just wish he'd done more of that, and spent less time on the details of Blum's cigarettes, Churchill's dinners, or the endless (and hilarious) follies of prominent Nazis.Īs a side note, this somewhat ADD-style of piling up anecdotes also makes the writing less wonderful than it could have been. He's obviously capable of explaining the whys of history, as the final chapter on the Nazi-Soviet pact makes clear. via detail of the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the cigarettes they smoked.' All of which is great if you want a 'feeling for the period', but pretty dismal and dull if you want to know *why* something happened. This is seemingly by design- 'this tome,' Brendon says, 'is a parcel of epitomies,' he claims to 'accumulate personal minutiae' and conjures up 'the contemporary experience. The vast majority of it reads like the work of an immensely talented autodidact historian who has completely lost his ability to follow a thought through an entire paragraph. But don't come to this book expecting explanation.

Given that though, he did a great job of laying out the facts. 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.īrendon 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.Brendon tried to the impossible with this book- there's just no way anyone can squeeze a decade as crazy as the thirties into one book. 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. Click here to purchase from Rakuten Kobo 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.ĭealing 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.

The Dark Valley by Piers Brendon