The Dark Valley
  • Published: 12 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9781446496329
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 752
Categories:

The Dark Valley

Formats & editions
EBook
12 May 2016
Tr. Paperback
6 Apr 2001
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A worldwide survey of the 1930s - popular history of breathtaking scholarship and scope.

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.
  • Published: 12 May 2016
  • ISBN: 9781446496329
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 752
Categories:

About the author

Piers Brendon

Piers Brendon is the author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, the best-selling Eminent Edwardians; The Windsors; The Dark Valley; The Hawker of Morwenstow; the highly acclaimed The Decline and Fall of the British Empire and, most recently, Eminent Elizabethans. He also writes for television and contributes frequently to the national press. Formerly Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre, he is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Also by Piers Brendon

Edward VIII (Penguin Monarchs)
Eminent Elizabethans
The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire
Eminent Edwardians
Hawker Of Morwenstow
Churchill
See all

Praise for The Dark Valley

A fantastic, sweeping history of the 1930s… Brendon is a superb writer, taking an exceptionally complex, dense topic and building a compelling narrative.

John Stepek, Money Week

A delight to read, a literary triumph sparkling with moments of real humour and compassion

Richard Overy, Sunday Telegraph

Brilliant, cinematic, utterly illuminating... No other historical account I know can rival this... Masterly

Valentine Cunningham, Financial Times

Piers Brendon's long book has such brilliance and narrative power, and contains so much fascinating detail, that reading it has all the excitement of novel

John Grigg, Evening Standard

The best history book I've read since Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy... Wonderful and enthralling

Ruth Rendell, Daily Telegraph
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