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The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s
The 1930s were perhaps the seminal decade in twentieth-century history, a dark time of global depression that displaced millions, paralyzed the liberal democracies, gave rise to totalitarian regimes, and, ultimately, led to the Second World War. In this sweeping history, Piers Brendon brings the tragic, dismal days of the 1930s to life.
From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate portrait of an era that make sense out of the fascinating, complicated, and profoundly influential years of the 1930s.
From Stalinist pogroms to New Deal programs, Brendon re-creates the full scope of a slow international descent towards war. Offering perfect sketches of the players, riveting descriptions of major events and crises, and telling details from everyday life, he offers both a grand, rousing narrative and an intimate portrait of an era that make sense out of the fascinating, complicated, and profoundly influential years of the 1930s.
848 pages, Paperback
First published April 27, 2000
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1472 people want to read
About the author
Piers Brendon
36 books30 followersPiers Brendon was educated at Shrewsbury School and Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read History. From 1965–1978, he was Lecturer in History, then Principal Lecturer and Head of Department, at what is now the Anglia Polytechnic University. From 1979 onwards he has worked as a free-lance writer of books, journalism and for television. From 1995 he has been a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and was Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre from 1995 to 2001
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 75 reviews
July 28, 2019
There are many things to like about this book, there are some things to dislike. Overall, easily 4 Stars for the vivid picture of the world between the wars, primarily the 1930’s and the rise of socialism in Europe and the consolidation of socialism in the USSR. Japan is a unique situation and his discussion is very interesting. Franco in Spain is covered well. On the other hand, his observations on the US and France are typical of the arrogant British academic. He fawns over FDR and his cronies and he detests the French. His description of Germany and the USSR are chilling. Italy and Mussolini are interesting in that you wonder how anyone took ''Il Duce'' seriously, such a buffoon. If you read the book, keep your smartphone handy as you will need it to translate Brit academic speak often (or you can look up these words ahead of time):
Not a complete list but some of the more uncommon words you will stumble across. Good vocabulary building!
I occasionally had a problem with his observations. Here is one: King George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and his son’s coronation were a democratic riposte to Hitler’s barbaric pageants at Nuremberg. Sorry, a coronation and a monarchy are not symbols of democracy....the peaceful handover of power from MacDonald to Baldwin to Chamberlain represents democracy.
The chilling picture of life under Stalin includes the regular disappearance of once stalwart Communists and modifying Stalin’s personal history as needed:
He (Stalin) later cut this fact from his official biography, one of so many Soviet re-shapings of the past in the interest of the present that a student of history complained, “You never know what’s going to happen yesterday”
History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. One theme is very similar to our time--the rise of mass media in the 1930’s and the rise of social media in the present. In the 30’s, movies, radio, propaganda, newspapers were under the control of socialists like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. They and their minions could control the message and present a one-sided view. Today’s SJWs have the same capability to control the narrative through revolutionary new social media and large corporations like you know who.
The impact of hyper inflation in Germany leading to the 1930’s was devastating and hard to imagine:
The French experience in the Great Depression was different than others:
Seriously…”angel-makers”? Disgusting.
The French like their wine, makes the hard times a little easier:
British feelings of brotherly love for their French wartime allies is somewhat lacking:
One of the best parts of this book is the description of Japan, looking for respect and feeling unfairly penalized by the West. Japan is as racist a country as you can find and lesser races had to give way, especially the Chinese:
The accounts of the famine caused by Stalin in the Ukraine are hard to read:
So many more excerpts I could post here but you get the point. Well written in the key areas and a must to understand the turbulent 1930’s and the march to another war. Highly recommended.
Not a complete list but some of the more uncommon words you will stumble across. Good vocabulary building!
I occasionally had a problem with his observations. Here is one: King George V’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and his son’s coronation were a democratic riposte to Hitler’s barbaric pageants at Nuremberg. Sorry, a coronation and a monarchy are not symbols of democracy....the peaceful handover of power from MacDonald to Baldwin to Chamberlain represents democracy.
The chilling picture of life under Stalin includes the regular disappearance of once stalwart Communists and modifying Stalin’s personal history as needed:
He (Stalin) later cut this fact from his official biography, one of so many Soviet re-shapings of the past in the interest of the present that a student of history complained, “You never know what’s going to happen yesterday”
History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. One theme is very similar to our time--the rise of mass media in the 1930’s and the rise of social media in the present. In the 30’s, movies, radio, propaganda, newspapers were under the control of socialists like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. They and their minions could control the message and present a one-sided view. Today’s SJWs have the same capability to control the narrative through revolutionary new social media and large corporations like you know who.
The impact of hyper inflation in Germany leading to the 1930’s was devastating and hard to imagine:
The French experience in the Great Depression was different than others:
Seriously…”angel-makers”? Disgusting.
The French like their wine, makes the hard times a little easier:
British feelings of brotherly love for their French wartime allies is somewhat lacking:
One of the best parts of this book is the description of Japan, looking for respect and feeling unfairly penalized by the West. Japan is as racist a country as you can find and lesser races had to give way, especially the Chinese:
The accounts of the famine caused by Stalin in the Ukraine are hard to read:
So many more excerpts I could post here but you get the point. Well written in the key areas and a must to understand the turbulent 1930’s and the march to another war. Highly recommended.
August 31, 2023
Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley provides a detailed, kaleidoscopic view of the 1930s, that momentous decade which began with the Great Depression and ended with World War II. Between lie a cavalcade of colorful personalities and momentous, world-rending events: fascism’s rise in Germany and Italy, Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union, Japanese militarism, Spanish Civil War, American social engineering and British Royal scandals, appeasement and complacency. Brendon’s book is hardly groundbreaking in tackling these subjects; his book makes heavy use of secondary sources and rarely challenges the conventional narrative. But there’s something be said for presenting old wine in colorful new bottles, and Brendon’s book is endlessly readable. His pen portraits of the era’s heavyweights (FDR and Leon Blum, Churchill and Chamberlain, Hitler and Mussolini, Stalin and Hirohito) are lively and convincing, using their personalities and actions to chart the world’s slide into madness. As in his The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Brendon displays a novelist’s eye for telling, colorful anecdotes that alternately humanize and ridicule his subjects: from Edward VIII’s coronation interrupted by a mishap with the crown jewels to Stalin enjoying imitations of his victim’s deaths, Hitler gulping mineral water during his speeches and Italian fascists raving about the evils of pasta. Alongside these Great (or not-so-great) Men are accounts of American soup kitchens, French labor unrest, inmates of Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps, Japanese war crimes in China, poorly-armed Ethiopians futilely resisting Mussolini’s tanks and poison gas. Brendon proves most angry detailing the British ruling class’s appeasement of and sympathy towards fascism, a well-worn topic but worth revisiting in the age of revisionism: he explodes the recent idea that Chamberlain’s appeasement was intended merely to buy time for rearmanent, rather that he and his fellow policymakers had no real qualms with Hitler’s designs the Fuhrer boxed him into a corner. (In contrast, Brendon strongly defends Churchill for his opposition to Hitler, while acknowledging his obtuseness on Indian independence, the gold standard and his defense of Edward VIII.) It was a decade with innumerable problems and few easy solutions: but, Brendon convincingly argues, the men charged with solving them were at best derelict, at worst complicit. The toll of fifty million dead and two continents laid waste make it hard to argue.
March 30, 2009
Piers Brendon is Britain's keeper of the Churchill Archives. This is hardly his first work. In addition to the expected Churchill biography, he's also written a couple of books on the Windsors, wrote the well-received "Emminent Edwardians" and even a biography on Ike. But for majesterial scope, its hard to imagine any book better than this.
Brendon calls his work a "panorama" of the 1930s and indeed it is. Like most of you who might check out this blog, I know something about the 30s. Munich, the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese military junta, Chamberlain, Soviet purges. You would be hard pressed to come up with a name of an event that was unfamiliar. But what is magical about this work is the way Brendon is able to weave the many threads of significant history into a single, coherent tapestry. Everything is inter-related. From Haile Selassie -- to the Depression -- to the Popular Front in France. Each of the events interplays with the other.
It is also a book with a real point of view, and one I found persuasive. Brendon takes neo-imperialist historians like Niall Ferguson to task. He won't accept that appeasement of Germany was the correct call, or that it did not contribute to World War. He Marshall's his facts pretty convincingly. There can be no doubt that Chamberlin's efforts to divert Hitler to the East alienated both Mussolini and Stalin from the west. It also weakened the hands of those in the military determined to rid the country of the little corporal. Whether or not Hitler's maddness would have inevitably led to conflict with the West is academic from his point of view. Hitler facing a fortified Czech frontier and the Red Army in 1938, is a Hitler defeated in 1939.
That is not to say that Brendon is totally unsympathetic to the dilemma of the democracies. He seems to have real empathy for France's situation. Buffeted brutally by the depression, France was being torn both left and right. Furthermore, having been literally bled dry in the last war, France's reluctance to fight again seems understandable.
But Brendon is a bit tougher on the home country. He notes that Britain was not as devastated by the Depression as the other leading powers. While there was unrest and even mutiny in the Royal Navy, none of it compared with circumstance of Germany, France or the Soviet Union. He highlights the desperate game of appeasement also played with the Japanese in vain hopes of holding on to the remnanents of empire in the East. In short, Brendon paints a pretty compelling picture of "perfidious albion." Its a picture with painful flourishes of dishonor, desperation and a touch of duplicity.
It should not be assumed that this is some sort of backhanded defense of Churchill. It is not. He seems fully aware of the great man's warts. Furthermore, given the period, Churchill is not exactly center stage. But he does reinforce a narrative that makes Churchill the right man at the right time.
Interestingly, the United States plays a relatively small part in the book. It is hightlighted initially as the first domino in the world wide depression. But then, as is appropriate, it tends only to interject herself on the margins of the narrative. Two players that sometimes get the short shrift though -- Italy and Japan are center stage. Exploring the machinations of these powers in all of the great events of the time, makes for a much richer story.
So Mr. Brendon has really left me with a panoramic view of the era. I see the full, broad picture now -- where I once only had snap shots. The 30s should be of interest to any student of history, and as a result, so should this book.
Brendon calls his work a "panorama" of the 1930s and indeed it is. Like most of you who might check out this blog, I know something about the 30s. Munich, the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese military junta, Chamberlain, Soviet purges. You would be hard pressed to come up with a name of an event that was unfamiliar. But what is magical about this work is the way Brendon is able to weave the many threads of significant history into a single, coherent tapestry. Everything is inter-related. From Haile Selassie -- to the Depression -- to the Popular Front in France. Each of the events interplays with the other.
It is also a book with a real point of view, and one I found persuasive. Brendon takes neo-imperialist historians like Niall Ferguson to task. He won't accept that appeasement of Germany was the correct call, or that it did not contribute to World War. He Marshall's his facts pretty convincingly. There can be no doubt that Chamberlin's efforts to divert Hitler to the East alienated both Mussolini and Stalin from the west. It also weakened the hands of those in the military determined to rid the country of the little corporal. Whether or not Hitler's maddness would have inevitably led to conflict with the West is academic from his point of view. Hitler facing a fortified Czech frontier and the Red Army in 1938, is a Hitler defeated in 1939.
That is not to say that Brendon is totally unsympathetic to the dilemma of the democracies. He seems to have real empathy for France's situation. Buffeted brutally by the depression, France was being torn both left and right. Furthermore, having been literally bled dry in the last war, France's reluctance to fight again seems understandable.
But Brendon is a bit tougher on the home country. He notes that Britain was not as devastated by the Depression as the other leading powers. While there was unrest and even mutiny in the Royal Navy, none of it compared with circumstance of Germany, France or the Soviet Union. He highlights the desperate game of appeasement also played with the Japanese in vain hopes of holding on to the remnanents of empire in the East. In short, Brendon paints a pretty compelling picture of "perfidious albion." Its a picture with painful flourishes of dishonor, desperation and a touch of duplicity.
It should not be assumed that this is some sort of backhanded defense of Churchill. It is not. He seems fully aware of the great man's warts. Furthermore, given the period, Churchill is not exactly center stage. But he does reinforce a narrative that makes Churchill the right man at the right time.
Interestingly, the United States plays a relatively small part in the book. It is hightlighted initially as the first domino in the world wide depression. But then, as is appropriate, it tends only to interject herself on the margins of the narrative. Two players that sometimes get the short shrift though -- Italy and Japan are center stage. Exploring the machinations of these powers in all of the great events of the time, makes for a much richer story.
So Mr. Brendon has really left me with a panoramic view of the era. I see the full, broad picture now -- where I once only had snap shots. The 30s should be of interest to any student of history, and as a result, so should this book.
September 28, 2009
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. Given that though, he did a great job of laying out the facts. But don't come to this book expecting explanation. 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. 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... 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. He's obviously capable of explaining the whys of history, as the final chapter on the Nazi-Soviet pact makes clear. 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.
As a side note, this somewhat ADD-style of piling up anecdotes also makes the writing less wonderful than it could have been. Brendon's obviously a talented stylist, but it's difficult to appreciate that when every sentence introduces a new epitome, rather than building on previous sentences, every paragraph introduces a new anecdote rather than explaining more fully the previous paragraph, and so on.
As a side note, this somewhat ADD-style of piling up anecdotes also makes the writing less wonderful than it could have been. Brendon's obviously a talented stylist, but it's difficult to appreciate that when every sentence introduces a new epitome, rather than building on previous sentences, every paragraph introduces a new anecdote rather than explaining more fully the previous paragraph, and so on.
July 28, 2012
Very much a prequel to your average one volume history of World War II, explaining how the major powers ended up getting drawn into a destructive war. Brendon's tack is to tackle each country's history individually, giving a chapter on the rise of Hitler after one on the Depression in America and the election of FDR.
This is a fine device so long as most governments were interested in tackling their own internal problems. It provides a nice understated way of showing that liberal politicians all over the Western world were generally ill-equipped to handle the Great Depression, which broke the economic rules that they had lived by until that point. There's something eerily familiar about the way in which politicians as disparate as Herbert Hoover (who at one point was best known as a humanitarian) to Philip Snowden (the nominally socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer, who proposed budgets much like his Conservative predecessor) to Osachi Hamaguchi (who disastrously placed Japan onto the gold standard in 1930) to the many French politicians who waged the "battle of the franc" blindly pursued the same orthodox measures.
Naturally, appeasement plays a large role in the narrative. And while the general shape of this story is well known, Brendon effectively demonstrates how this too was rooted in the economic crisis of the era. In less stable countries, economic distress undermined already fragile democratic institutions, prompting conventional politicians to attempt to co-opt radical movements as a prop for their own agenda. German and Japanese politicians who were so tempted quickly found themselves appendages to radical agendas. Even in more stable countries, the needs of austerity budgeting often came at the expense of the military, leaving democratic politicians with a weak hand to play on the world stage. None of this is revolutionary stuff, but as an American I often hear the failure of Munich attributed to some right-winger's caricature of liberal do-goodism or general European decadence so it was nice to see.
(Also, as much as Munich has been overused as an argument to prop one or another dumbass foreign adventure the failure of the democracies to contain Hitler or accomplish much of anything else really is astonishing. The response to the invasion of Ethiopia is particularly instructive: had Britain and France wanted to stop Italy, they easily could have done so and established themselves as a power to reckoned with; had they cynically recognized Italy's 'rights' over Ethiopia, Mussolini might have exchanged this for an anti-German alliance. Instead they saw fit to insult Mussolini in public, establish sanctions against Mussolini that were deliberately ineffective, and cynically give away Ethiopian territory in private. To paraphrase Apocalypse Now, it's not so much that their methods were unsound as there didn't seem to be any method at all.)
Brendon is a compelling author with a gift for the inspired detail or set-piece. I loved the aristocratic Roman nobleman grousing after the Pope signed a Concardat with Mussolini that in the good old days the pontiff would simply have been poisoned, or NRA chief Hugh Johnson bragging to reporters that he grew up in the backwoods "where the owls fucked the chickens." On topics where I knew fairly little (as with the Popular Front in France or the Chinese Civil War), he left me wishing that I knew more, which IMO is the mark of a successful general history. However, I think the limits of his structure showed towards the end of the book, as he was forced to return to certain key events (like the Anschluss, or the crisis over the Sudetenland) over and over again to give new points of view. Overall, this is a very good history of the lead up to the Second World War, and one that left me wanting more.
This is a fine device so long as most governments were interested in tackling their own internal problems. It provides a nice understated way of showing that liberal politicians all over the Western world were generally ill-equipped to handle the Great Depression, which broke the economic rules that they had lived by until that point. There's something eerily familiar about the way in which politicians as disparate as Herbert Hoover (who at one point was best known as a humanitarian) to Philip Snowden (the nominally socialist Chancellor of the Exchequer, who proposed budgets much like his Conservative predecessor) to Osachi Hamaguchi (who disastrously placed Japan onto the gold standard in 1930) to the many French politicians who waged the "battle of the franc" blindly pursued the same orthodox measures.
Naturally, appeasement plays a large role in the narrative. And while the general shape of this story is well known, Brendon effectively demonstrates how this too was rooted in the economic crisis of the era. In less stable countries, economic distress undermined already fragile democratic institutions, prompting conventional politicians to attempt to co-opt radical movements as a prop for their own agenda. German and Japanese politicians who were so tempted quickly found themselves appendages to radical agendas. Even in more stable countries, the needs of austerity budgeting often came at the expense of the military, leaving democratic politicians with a weak hand to play on the world stage. None of this is revolutionary stuff, but as an American I often hear the failure of Munich attributed to some right-winger's caricature of liberal do-goodism or general European decadence so it was nice to see.
(Also, as much as Munich has been overused as an argument to prop one or another dumbass foreign adventure the failure of the democracies to contain Hitler or accomplish much of anything else really is astonishing. The response to the invasion of Ethiopia is particularly instructive: had Britain and France wanted to stop Italy, they easily could have done so and established themselves as a power to reckoned with; had they cynically recognized Italy's 'rights' over Ethiopia, Mussolini might have exchanged this for an anti-German alliance. Instead they saw fit to insult Mussolini in public, establish sanctions against Mussolini that were deliberately ineffective, and cynically give away Ethiopian territory in private. To paraphrase Apocalypse Now, it's not so much that their methods were unsound as there didn't seem to be any method at all.)
Brendon is a compelling author with a gift for the inspired detail or set-piece. I loved the aristocratic Roman nobleman grousing after the Pope signed a Concardat with Mussolini that in the good old days the pontiff would simply have been poisoned, or NRA chief Hugh Johnson bragging to reporters that he grew up in the backwoods "where the owls fucked the chickens." On topics where I knew fairly little (as with the Popular Front in France or the Chinese Civil War), he left me wishing that I knew more, which IMO is the mark of a successful general history. However, I think the limits of his structure showed towards the end of the book, as he was forced to return to certain key events (like the Anschluss, or the crisis over the Sudetenland) over and over again to give new points of view. Overall, this is a very good history of the lead up to the Second World War, and one that left me wanting more.
May 5, 2020
superb history. Brendon is a master lyricist who creates a vast panorama through consummate attention to detail and telling anecdote. in confident, incisive prose, the writer captures the reader's attention about that dark decade, the 1930s, forerunner to the horrific world war two.
the stories that comprise this grand volume are sometimes so fitting, I find myself wanting to confirm them in other sources. 5/5 easy, a first-class work.
the stories that comprise this grand volume are sometimes so fitting, I find myself wanting to confirm them in other sources. 5/5 easy, a first-class work.
September 2, 2019
The author begins by quoting Auden: the 1930's were a 'low, dishonest, and dirty', a moral ground zero which gave way to the immense bloodletting of the second world war. He then proves this through some wonderfully detailed narrative history dealing with the US, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan and the Soviet Union in turn. The author's grasp of the detail is one of the book's most obvious strengths and many of the individual chapters and sections would work well as free standing works (I am thinking particularly of the chapters on, for example, Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia or the two pivotal chapters on the Spanish civil war). What is more challenging - and a problem for many readers - is the author's reluctance to draw broad conclusions. They are there but you have to work to draw them out. Paramount among these are the centrality of the Great Depression to subsequent events, leading many politicians to focus on domestic rather than foreign events (Chamberlain justifying his failure to re-arm: 'I'd rather gamble on foreign policy than on the economy'); the extent to which appeasement was a disaster, pushing the Soviet Union into its fateful pact with the Nazis; and above all how a climate of mendacity allows the worst to flourish.
I re-read this book because I'm curious about the parallels between the 1930's and the current decade. Comparisons like this are always fraught and whilst I'd hesitate to say the two decades are similar I would definitely say that what we are experiencing is more like the 1930's than any of the intervening decades were. Politicians who lie most and loudest would appear to be the most successful (Auden - again: 'The best lack all conviction whilst the worst are full of passionate intensity'). No-one is taking a stand against authoritarianism, whether in relation to the abolition of the special status of Kashmir or the current situation in Hong Kong. Democracy appears to have very little left to say for itself, and some of the self-styled leaders of the free world are toying with going over to the other side. Absolutely no one in power is serious about the climate crisis. What times. Will we get it right? I am an optimist so I believe so, but only after experimenting with all other alternatives.
I re-read this book because I'm curious about the parallels between the 1930's and the current decade. Comparisons like this are always fraught and whilst I'd hesitate to say the two decades are similar I would definitely say that what we are experiencing is more like the 1930's than any of the intervening decades were. Politicians who lie most and loudest would appear to be the most successful (Auden - again: 'The best lack all conviction whilst the worst are full of passionate intensity'). No-one is taking a stand against authoritarianism, whether in relation to the abolition of the special status of Kashmir or the current situation in Hong Kong. Democracy appears to have very little left to say for itself, and some of the self-styled leaders of the free world are toying with going over to the other side. Absolutely no one in power is serious about the climate crisis. What times. Will we get it right? I am an optimist so I believe so, but only after experimenting with all other alternatives.
April 7, 2015
Well that was epic! I don't think I've ever consulted a dictionary, Wikipedia and Google Translate as frequently as I did while reading this doorstopper. But Brendon does exactly what he promises: gives a comprehensive overview of the events of the 1930s which led to WWII. If you've ever wondered how Japan even got involved with the Axis powers, or why the Spanish Civil War had so many foreign fighters, this is the book for you.
Brendon focuses each chapter on one of the primary combatants of WWII, sometimes overlapping time periods so he can present the same event from a different angle. He adds snippets of pop culture to demonstrate public opinion of political events, which really makes them come alive for me. The ten dollar words and bits of untranslated French were unnecessary, but that's academic writing for you I suppose. And skipping the lists of furnishings and the revolving-door ministries of Britain and France would have shortened it without losing much of interest.
The "panorama" of the subtitle is a really good description of this book. I didn't take history in high school, so I feel like this has filled in a large gap in my knowledge by presenting the standard thinking on the causes of WWII. Of course, that just raises more questions but now I have a context for them.
Brendon focuses each chapter on one of the primary combatants of WWII, sometimes overlapping time periods so he can present the same event from a different angle. He adds snippets of pop culture to demonstrate public opinion of political events, which really makes them come alive for me. The ten dollar words and bits of untranslated French were unnecessary, but that's academic writing for you I suppose. And skipping the lists of furnishings and the revolving-door ministries of Britain and France would have shortened it without losing much of interest.
The "panorama" of the subtitle is a really good description of this book. I didn't take history in high school, so I feel like this has filled in a large gap in my knowledge by presenting the standard thinking on the causes of WWII. Of course, that just raises more questions but now I have a context for them.
February 25, 2017
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.
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.
January 11, 2024
This book achieves what it sets out to do, but doesn't have the je ne sais quoi to push it from a rather conventional history book into the rank of elite history writing.
The book covers the political, social, and economic histories of the USA, England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan from the stock market crash of 1929 through the outbreak of World War II (with an interlude for the Spanish Civil War). Given a large enough canvas, Brendon does an effective job of pushing back on the idea that the start of WWII was an outcome destined to happen as a result of the weakness of the Post-Versailles order. While the Post-Versailles order was indeed weak (made more so by the crippling impact of the depression), Brendon details the consistently demonstrated lack of political will and leadership by the Allied countries to enforce the world order they created after WWI. What I particularly liked is his detailing the causal relationship between the continued inaction by the Allies to fascist aggression and the resulting transfer of political strength from the democracies to the fascist regimes.
As a political history, it isn't as well-honed of a narrative as, for example, the middle chapters of Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy" (which covers the same topics). But Brendon adds more social and cultural history with discussion, for example, of Hollywood and Coco Chanel- topics that are interesting on their own and also serve to break up the monotony.
The book covers the political, social, and economic histories of the USA, England, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Japan from the stock market crash of 1929 through the outbreak of World War II (with an interlude for the Spanish Civil War). Given a large enough canvas, Brendon does an effective job of pushing back on the idea that the start of WWII was an outcome destined to happen as a result of the weakness of the Post-Versailles order. While the Post-Versailles order was indeed weak (made more so by the crippling impact of the depression), Brendon details the consistently demonstrated lack of political will and leadership by the Allied countries to enforce the world order they created after WWI. What I particularly liked is his detailing the causal relationship between the continued inaction by the Allies to fascist aggression and the resulting transfer of political strength from the democracies to the fascist regimes.
As a political history, it isn't as well-honed of a narrative as, for example, the middle chapters of Henry Kissinger's "Diplomacy" (which covers the same topics). But Brendon adds more social and cultural history with discussion, for example, of Hollywood and Coco Chanel- topics that are interesting on their own and also serve to break up the monotony.
November 23, 2009
My daughter will be assigned readings from this in her history class this year. Sounds fascinating! Oddly (or not so), the teacher mentioned the kids often don't like it much. Yet they'll know it's there as they get older and wiser, and they can return and appreciate it later (certainly most do). (perhaps).
The especially interesting thing about this is that it approaches these events and this period from an epistemological perspective. That is, it's all about what people thought they knew, why they thought they knew, what the differences were people the truth and what people thought they knew, the processes controlling the misinformation, etc.. And, in a nutshell, Brendon says in the intro that this period (the 30's) was marked in the vast disinformation spread and consumed, in the lack of truth actually possessed by most people, etc..
Relevance to today with the tactics in use still by many is profound.
On Hitler, speaking, early on in his quest for power (1922-1923 or so):
"As Otto Strasser said, 'His words go like an arrow to their target, he touches each private wound on the raw, liberating the unconscious, exposing its innermost aspirations, telling it what it most wants to hear.'"
By the way: Marx really said 'Peasants are like potatoes in a sack.'?????
I finished it!! I finished it!! I finished it!! Woo-hooooo!!!! Yes, this is one of *those* books, when turning the last page is immensely satisfying. And also among the least satisfying, because there was so much there that I didn't get. So many words I'd honestly never heard of before, and references to things that I was oblivious to. Since I don't know what all the references were to, I can't be sure, but it seems one would need to be familiar with European & East Asian history from about 1850 forward, plus all the literature of those regions in that period as well. And then a smattering of ancient greek and roman times wouldn't hurt either. Despite that though, it was very informative. I especially liked towards the end when Piers would describe what this or that person believed, and then how totally, profoundly wrong they were.
The primary example being Stalin, when he signed the pact with Hitler. Both this book and my companion text 'Concise Atlas of World History' stress that Russia lost more in resources and people than any other country.
There is definitely a psychological thread that runs through this - specific cases of people knowing something, and maintaining denial of it enthusiastically, wishful thinking, manipulation, constructions of reality, etc..
Six weeks is all the time it took Hitler to take over France? Wow, no Verdun that time .. I've totally to read up on WWII itself again.
The weirdest thing for me about this- hardly any mention of the Jewish people. Sure, there were brief descriptions of a few of the main points. But amazingly little, considering.
And from my personal interest in India, I paid attention to all mentions of it. There were more than enough to be indexed, seems to me (but India wasn't), and unfortunately all did speak to a certain English chauvinism which I guess shouldn't surprise me.
Highly recommend!
The especially interesting thing about this is that it approaches these events and this period from an epistemological perspective. That is, it's all about what people thought they knew, why they thought they knew, what the differences were people the truth and what people thought they knew, the processes controlling the misinformation, etc.. And, in a nutshell, Brendon says in the intro that this period (the 30's) was marked in the vast disinformation spread and consumed, in the lack of truth actually possessed by most people, etc..
Relevance to today with the tactics in use still by many is profound.
On Hitler, speaking, early on in his quest for power (1922-1923 or so):
"As Otto Strasser said, 'His words go like an arrow to their target, he touches each private wound on the raw, liberating the unconscious, exposing its innermost aspirations, telling it what it most wants to hear.'"
By the way: Marx really said 'Peasants are like potatoes in a sack.'?????
I finished it!! I finished it!! I finished it!! Woo-hooooo!!!! Yes, this is one of *those* books, when turning the last page is immensely satisfying. And also among the least satisfying, because there was so much there that I didn't get. So many words I'd honestly never heard of before, and references to things that I was oblivious to. Since I don't know what all the references were to, I can't be sure, but it seems one would need to be familiar with European & East Asian history from about 1850 forward, plus all the literature of those regions in that period as well. And then a smattering of ancient greek and roman times wouldn't hurt either. Despite that though, it was very informative. I especially liked towards the end when Piers would describe what this or that person believed, and then how totally, profoundly wrong they were.
The primary example being Stalin, when he signed the pact with Hitler. Both this book and my companion text 'Concise Atlas of World History' stress that Russia lost more in resources and people than any other country.
There is definitely a psychological thread that runs through this - specific cases of people knowing something, and maintaining denial of it enthusiastically, wishful thinking, manipulation, constructions of reality, etc..
Six weeks is all the time it took Hitler to take over France? Wow, no Verdun that time .. I've totally to read up on WWII itself again.
The weirdest thing for me about this- hardly any mention of the Jewish people. Sure, there were brief descriptions of a few of the main points. But amazingly little, considering.
And from my personal interest in India, I paid attention to all mentions of it. There were more than enough to be indexed, seems to me (but India wasn't), and unfortunately all did speak to a certain English chauvinism which I guess shouldn't surprise me.
Highly recommend!
December 18, 2013
ON THE ROAD TO WAR
Having found Piers Brendon's "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire" an entertaining and informative read I turned with a sense of expectation to his earlier work: a global history of Auden's low dishonest decade "The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s".
This 600 page tome is a massive montage of anecdotes, events and personalities that in combination with Brendon's well reasoned analysis, readable and sharply witty prose are woven together into a seamless whole that charts the experience of 8 major countries (The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, The Soviet Union, China and Japan) through out the decade that lead to the Second World War. Like his work on the British Empire this book will entertain and inform those with a general interest in the era without over simplifying the issues at stake. Though there are occasions when Brendon's virtuoso performance does appear to go astray (as in the case of the British Royal Family) the reader will rarely be bored and as un-edified as they might expect.
The central theme of this book is the experience of the Great Depression and the effect this had on developments within the 8 individual countries, the relations between them and how this lead on towards War. While not being a book that is academic, or intensely analytical, it is aware of the Economic factors that lead to the bloodiest conflict in world history, especially those differences between the "Have" and the "Have-not" powers (the Empire light Germany, Italy and Japan). Those parts that deal with the tensions in Japan between the military and the liberal internationally minded political establishment were of particular interest, as is the account of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the devastating "famine" and purges within the Soviet Union. In the middle of the work, Brendon takes us out-with the 8 core countries of his study (but not out of their influence) into an account of the Spanish Civil War. This acts the part of a microcosm of central issues such as Fascism's violently revisionist activism, Soviet intervention and the follies of non-intervention by the Americans, British and French: equivalent to the policy of appeasement applied by the British and French to Nazi Germany.
Brendon seems to be a specialist in writing broad based books that engage the larger historical issues without shirking the responsibility a writer has of being readable. Recommended to those who are relatively new to the subject, and those who are not so new will be sure to find something that is new.
Having found Piers Brendon's "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire" an entertaining and informative read I turned with a sense of expectation to his earlier work: a global history of Auden's low dishonest decade "The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s".
This 600 page tome is a massive montage of anecdotes, events and personalities that in combination with Brendon's well reasoned analysis, readable and sharply witty prose are woven together into a seamless whole that charts the experience of 8 major countries (The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, The Soviet Union, China and Japan) through out the decade that lead to the Second World War. Like his work on the British Empire this book will entertain and inform those with a general interest in the era without over simplifying the issues at stake. Though there are occasions when Brendon's virtuoso performance does appear to go astray (as in the case of the British Royal Family) the reader will rarely be bored and as un-edified as they might expect.
The central theme of this book is the experience of the Great Depression and the effect this had on developments within the 8 individual countries, the relations between them and how this lead on towards War. While not being a book that is academic, or intensely analytical, it is aware of the Economic factors that lead to the bloodiest conflict in world history, especially those differences between the "Have" and the "Have-not" powers (the Empire light Germany, Italy and Japan). Those parts that deal with the tensions in Japan between the military and the liberal internationally minded political establishment were of particular interest, as is the account of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the devastating "famine" and purges within the Soviet Union. In the middle of the work, Brendon takes us out-with the 8 core countries of his study (but not out of their influence) into an account of the Spanish Civil War. This acts the part of a microcosm of central issues such as Fascism's violently revisionist activism, Soviet intervention and the follies of non-intervention by the Americans, British and French: equivalent to the policy of appeasement applied by the British and French to Nazi Germany.
Brendon seems to be a specialist in writing broad based books that engage the larger historical issues without shirking the responsibility a writer has of being readable. Recommended to those who are relatively new to the subject, and those who are not so new will be sure to find something that is new.
July 7, 2016
Mostly the worst of times, the decade of 1929 to 1939 was pretty awful, culminating in the worse loss of life on the planet since the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Divided up into different sections, each deeper than the previous one, Brendon chronicles the slow disintegration of peace and stability worldwide as the Great Depression leaks out all over the United States, Europe and Asia. Various storylines cover the conditions in the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, China and the Soviet Union, including the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the purges of Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, and Japan's militarism in Asia. Interesting sidelights that are rarely covered in great detail in histories about the era, such as the concordats the Catholic Church signed with the fascist states, Mussolini's brutal invasion of Ethiopia and the characters involved in all these intrigues, Baldwin, MacDonald, Churchill, Herbert Hoover, Haile Selassie, Beria, Emperor Hirohito, and many others. A monumental work.
April 10, 2008
I often think of this as the best book I have ever read. It is for sure top two.
This is a very well written history book about the world in the 1930's. The time of depression, growth of fascism, nazism and Japanese fanatsism, that eventually led to World War II.
What makes this different from other history books, is the very personal way the stories are told. Little details such as that Stalin slept on a very hard bed, makes you connect and better understand these people. Imagine what may have driven these men.
I have read this book something like three times and given it to several people as presents.
It is not only interesting to read, it also explains basically all of the 20th century.
This is a very well written history book about the world in the 1930's. The time of depression, growth of fascism, nazism and Japanese fanatsism, that eventually led to World War II.
What makes this different from other history books, is the very personal way the stories are told. Little details such as that Stalin slept on a very hard bed, makes you connect and better understand these people. Imagine what may have driven these men.
I have read this book something like three times and given it to several people as presents.
It is not only interesting to read, it also explains basically all of the 20th century.
August 13, 2025
Uncomfortably familiar terrain.
August 9, 2025
The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s is an excellent book about a dark decade which previewed even more dreadful coming attractions.
Historian Piers Brendon looked at this tumultuous time from the perspective of eight different countries: France, Britain, Russia, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States. (The Spanish Civil War received its own chapter.) He weaves together a story of how, beginning in the early 1930s, these countries tried to implement their own remedies to the burgeoning Great Depression.
One clear takeaway readers will have is the all-encompassing nature of this economic collapse in explaining the rush to -isms and the World War which ultimately followed. The growth of fascism in Germany and Italy (the latter country of which it was already much further along than the former at the start of the Depression) is detailed by Brendon, as are flirtations with this movement in France and even England.
Japan's collapse into its own unique form of militaristic, nationalistic fascistic is expounded on at length as well.
Communism also had its tentacles in Russia by the time of the Depression's onset, and the book tells about its attempts (mostly unsuccessful) to find additional fertile soil in both France and England.
The implementation of the New Deal in the United States was held up to largely be an effort to utilize the democratic system in an attempt to beat back the allure of both fascism and Communism.
A handful of characters obviously loom above the rest in The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, although some of its stronger parts occur thanks to the smaller anecdotes and players it highlights.
Benito Mussolini's efforts to turn Gabriele D'Annunzio's embryonic efforts to bring fascism into being via a full-fledged dictatorship of course loom large. Emperor Hirohito's failed efforts to bring his own Japanese militarists to heel also figures in the plot, as does Adolf Hitler's subversion of the democratic system to aid the Nazis and Joseph Stalin's brutal totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.
But discussions of other elements that might not always be center stage make this book a strong read. There is a section on the creation of France's Maginot Line during the interwar years, and Charles de Gaulle's quote that "static security...can never be complete" drove home the extent to which France's defensive, fighting-the-last-war mentality ultimately cost it everything in 1940.
Brendon goes in-depth regarding the creation of the Popular Front and the musical chairs/constantly shifting nature of the French interwar governments. Prime Ministers like Edouard Harriot, Pierre Laval, Camille Chantempts, and Edouard Daladier tried, oftentimes with little success, to hold the Third Republic together in the face of threats from the Communistic left and Action Francaise/Jeunesses Patriotes right wing.
The fifteen deaths and 2,000 wounded courtesy of the February 6th, 1934 Paris fascistic rights lent credence to a country careening out of control. The Concorde Riot also provided a stark reminder of the Bonus Army which had descended on the capital of a different Western democracy and also produced disorder when clashes with the police and military arrived.
In a less gloomy section, the International Exposition in Paris during 1937 was featured for several pages. It is referred to as a"glorification of the entire spectrum of light" and "a beacon in a drab decade" which was "an attempt not only to foster global harmony but also to revive industry and boost morale at home."
Even at the Exposition, the Soviet and German expositions faced and attempted to "outdo" one another in size and imposition. The American pavilion, meanwhile, was in no way martial; it featured the skyline of New York City and showed images of Tennessee Valley Authority dams as well as photos from Hollywood.
Great Britain featured so much genteel leisure in its pavilion that, the author notes, it did not contrast well with Mussolini's Roman Emperor posturing for Italy.
With Mussolini already ensconced in the power by the dawning of 1930, Brendon ensured there wa a lot of focus on the Catholic Church's cowardice under Pope Pius XI and XII. The taps on the wrist they gave Mussolini provided little in the way of redemption for the numerous times they caved under fascist pressure and, at times, the outright support they provided for reactionary rightist causes.
The invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was the second most analyzed fight aside from the Spanish Civil War. The destruction of Hailie Selassie's army in what was a nakedly aggressive colonialist war waged by Italy earned little in the way of condemnation from the Vatican, and Brendon also drags countries like France and England for doing little beyond providing rhetorical condemnation and widely discrediting the League of Nations as well as collective security.
The amount of war crimes and atrocities committed at the hands of Pietro Badoglio's men can only be imagined, but the quote from a Red Cross worker who spoke of an elderly patient who" looked as if someone had tried to skin him, clumsily; he had been horribly burned by ‘mustard gas’ all over the face, the back, and the arm. There were many others like him: some more, some less severely affected; some newly burned, others older, their sores already caked with thick brown scabs, men and women alike, all horribly disfigured, and little children too. And many blinded by the stuff, with blurred crimson apologies for eyes." provides at least a bit of illumination.
Furthermore, the Spanish Civil War provided a dark continental prelude to what was going to unfold in the coming years. From Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Teruel, Ebro, and Belchite to the bombed-out Guernica, this Francisco Franco-sparked war proved to be a training ground for future Red Army and Wehrmacht (and Luftwaffe) fighters alike.
The fighting between the Nationalists and Republicans, with even the likes of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell traveling to fight with International Brigades, was laid out in harrowing detail in The Dark Valley. This war featured its own litany of atrocities, with deep Spanish divisions between the rightist elements of the Catholic Church and the socialistic left tearing the southern European country apart.
Elements of anarchism and Communism mingled with the anti-Franco forces, ultimately making it difficult to maintain a united front against the Nationalist army and leading to the Republicans' ultimate defeat. To hear The Dark Valley tell it, "...Franco's victory, achieved by April 1, 1939 after the conquest of Catalonia and the collapse of Madrid, was a victory for Hitler. Mussolini shared in it to a lesser extent-Spain had cost Italy far more than Ethiopia. But Pope Pius XII, in a jubilant message to Franco, thanked the Lord for "'Spain's desired Catholic victory.'"
The losers were...the democracies. They had let slip their chance to form a united front with Russia against Germany. They had demonstrated the impotence of international arbitration and led Hitler to believe that he could go on freely expanding in Europe...On his eight-foot long thick desk in the high-ceilinged Bishop's Palace at Salamanca...the Caudillo had framed photographs of the Fuhrer and Duce. In January 1939 Franco told von Richthofen that he would not think of turning to Britain and France because they had "'antiquated political and economic convictions and were declining powers whose methods were not suited to a rising Spain.'"
In Japan, a host of military figures were shown trying to seize control of the country's foreign policy during a time of domestic economic unrest. The invasion of China in 1931, the Mukden incident, and the the subsequent takeover of Manchuria were painted as a sort of Japanese-style Asian Lebensraum. Military cliques led by the likes of Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Kwantung Army Intelligence head Seishiro Itagaki were shown to be the real drivers of the country's policies, a sort of return to the behind-the-scenes pre-Meiji days of the shogunate actually determining the emperor's policies.
In Japan itself the book states that, following the early 1930s assassination of Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi and the founding of the nationalistic Cherry Blossom Society "...individual assassination and mass murder became instruments of policy." The rearguard actions of liberals and institutionalists like Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and Prince Saionji Kinmochi to prevent the country from fully falling into martial, possibly suicidal hands resembled what was going on simultaneously (to varying degrees of success) in numerous Western capitals.
Possibly the most well-written and moving sections involve everyday life in the Soviet Union during what must have been a hellish decade. The collectivization of agriculture (and the subsequent killing off of nearly forty percent of Kazakhstan's population during this process) and the downright torture of Ukrainian kulaks in particular show how insensible-not to mention insensitive to any human suffering- so many of Joseph Stalin's policies truly were. Russia's obsession with "catching up" to the capitalists countries during what, for many of them, was a lost decade led to a massive upheaval of society and social relationships.
The mass starvation and medieval style living standards of rural Soviet peasants was relayed through the book's strong prose.
"Confused by the conflicting evidence..." Brendon wrote in words evocative of the current Palestinian horrors and explaining how so many Americans and Brits continued to hold Stalinism up as a success while all of this was unfolding, "...many Westerners reckoned that that the reality lay somewhere between the extremes. The best accounts of Russia seemed too good to be true while the worst were surely incredible...The horrors of Soviet life are such that rew people in the Western world could be brought to believe them."
Some Westerners who had idolized Communism, like Andre Gide and Fred Beal, had their illusions shattered upon traveling there. Others like Upton Sinclair and George Bernard Shaw seemed to be more willing to hold onto their illusions of the workers' paradise brought by the Five Year Plan and the stunning Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks.
The one European country which perhaps could have staved off the worse outcomes of a second World War was Great Britain. But it, too, was paralyzed during the 1930s with its own internal problems and remained haunted by memories of the Great War not two decades in the rearview mirror.
While King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had a pageantry-filled state isitt to France in July 1938 in an attempt to show democratic solidarity (the Eiffel Tower even flew the Union Jack), Mussolini's visit to Italy the previous year and Hitler post-Anschluss visit to Italy two months prior to Paris had also been stage-managed presentations of their own, undertaken to demonstrate fascistic solidarity with massive pomp and circumstance.
But the royal family could not paper off the mess British foreign policy was in during this decade. While Winston Churchill took an increasingly anti-Nazi posture as the 1930s wore on, Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain never seemed able to find the backbone to stand up to Hitler or Mussolini when it really could have counted.
The empire's (in hindsight) naive attempts to appease Hitler come in for lengthy examination, with foreign policy hands like Anthony Eden not escaping Brendon's penetrating look. From Addis Ababa to Munich to Vienna to the Sudetenland, there is nonstop goalpost moving and excuse-making as the democracies-which the fascist leaders viewed as weak and decadent-mistakenly felt they were dealing with others in good faith.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to keep Americans upbeat and away from reactionary politics on one hand and too extreme leftist ones on the other played out through his New Deal programs. (The failures of the Coolidge White House to act decisively during the Depression's initial days were outlined early on.)
The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act; a series of alphabet soup agencies and the men like Henry A. Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, Rexford Tugwell, and Arthur Morgan who were charged with making them a success came in for examination courtesy of Brendon's exhaustive research.
Brendon lauded FDR for abandoning the court packing scheme he had floated, a decision the author indicates coast Roosevelt the ability to gain extremely high levels of support from the broader electorate going forward. He clearly believes FDR handled this economic crisis with more skill than other Western leaders, doing enough in the way of activism to keep the likes of demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin from gaining too much power.
The Dark Valley is chock full of societal and political observations from this gloomy decade. Its shortcomings are few, but the author’s employment of cute quotes from one figure after another really does become grating even before the book’s halfway point is reached. These are kind of compelling at first, but the pithy quotes just seem to cheapen some of the surrounding paragraphs.
This does not, however, detract from what is an overall strong piece of nonfiction writing.
The albeit limited portions referenced in this review cannot do justice to the sprawling, impressively detailed nature of The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s.
A key takeaway is the degree to which the Great Depression contributed to so much of this decade's calamities. While it is a counterfactual, there is almost no way the Second World War would have unfolded in the way it did absent this economic calamity.
The fascist's main obsessions were grievances and eliminating "weakness;" one can only wonder how things might have played out differently had the League of Nations and western democracies shown more sternness in the years leading up to Poland's invasion.
It provides about as strong of a feel for this decade as any one volume book can, bringing in a slew of players and outlining a number of inflection points which ultimately produced a Holocaust and World War with tens of millions dead.
This war can only be truly understood and its causes appreciated by reading this incredibly well-researched book.
-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado
Historian Piers Brendon looked at this tumultuous time from the perspective of eight different countries: France, Britain, Russia, Japan, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States. (The Spanish Civil War received its own chapter.) He weaves together a story of how, beginning in the early 1930s, these countries tried to implement their own remedies to the burgeoning Great Depression.
One clear takeaway readers will have is the all-encompassing nature of this economic collapse in explaining the rush to -isms and the World War which ultimately followed. The growth of fascism in Germany and Italy (the latter country of which it was already much further along than the former at the start of the Depression) is detailed by Brendon, as are flirtations with this movement in France and even England.
Japan's collapse into its own unique form of militaristic, nationalistic fascistic is expounded on at length as well.
Communism also had its tentacles in Russia by the time of the Depression's onset, and the book tells about its attempts (mostly unsuccessful) to find additional fertile soil in both France and England.
The implementation of the New Deal in the United States was held up to largely be an effort to utilize the democratic system in an attempt to beat back the allure of both fascism and Communism.
A handful of characters obviously loom above the rest in The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, although some of its stronger parts occur thanks to the smaller anecdotes and players it highlights.
Benito Mussolini's efforts to turn Gabriele D'Annunzio's embryonic efforts to bring fascism into being via a full-fledged dictatorship of course loom large. Emperor Hirohito's failed efforts to bring his own Japanese militarists to heel also figures in the plot, as does Adolf Hitler's subversion of the democratic system to aid the Nazis and Joseph Stalin's brutal totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.
But discussions of other elements that might not always be center stage make this book a strong read. There is a section on the creation of France's Maginot Line during the interwar years, and Charles de Gaulle's quote that "static security...can never be complete" drove home the extent to which France's defensive, fighting-the-last-war mentality ultimately cost it everything in 1940.
Brendon goes in-depth regarding the creation of the Popular Front and the musical chairs/constantly shifting nature of the French interwar governments. Prime Ministers like Edouard Harriot, Pierre Laval, Camille Chantempts, and Edouard Daladier tried, oftentimes with little success, to hold the Third Republic together in the face of threats from the Communistic left and Action Francaise/Jeunesses Patriotes right wing.
The fifteen deaths and 2,000 wounded courtesy of the February 6th, 1934 Paris fascistic rights lent credence to a country careening out of control. The Concorde Riot also provided a stark reminder of the Bonus Army which had descended on the capital of a different Western democracy and also produced disorder when clashes with the police and military arrived.
In a less gloomy section, the International Exposition in Paris during 1937 was featured for several pages. It is referred to as a"glorification of the entire spectrum of light" and "a beacon in a drab decade" which was "an attempt not only to foster global harmony but also to revive industry and boost morale at home."
Even at the Exposition, the Soviet and German expositions faced and attempted to "outdo" one another in size and imposition. The American pavilion, meanwhile, was in no way martial; it featured the skyline of New York City and showed images of Tennessee Valley Authority dams as well as photos from Hollywood.
Great Britain featured so much genteel leisure in its pavilion that, the author notes, it did not contrast well with Mussolini's Roman Emperor posturing for Italy.
With Mussolini already ensconced in the power by the dawning of 1930, Brendon ensured there wa a lot of focus on the Catholic Church's cowardice under Pope Pius XI and XII. The taps on the wrist they gave Mussolini provided little in the way of redemption for the numerous times they caved under fascist pressure and, at times, the outright support they provided for reactionary rightist causes.
The invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 was the second most analyzed fight aside from the Spanish Civil War. The destruction of Hailie Selassie's army in what was a nakedly aggressive colonialist war waged by Italy earned little in the way of condemnation from the Vatican, and Brendon also drags countries like France and England for doing little beyond providing rhetorical condemnation and widely discrediting the League of Nations as well as collective security.
The amount of war crimes and atrocities committed at the hands of Pietro Badoglio's men can only be imagined, but the quote from a Red Cross worker who spoke of an elderly patient who" looked as if someone had tried to skin him, clumsily; he had been horribly burned by ‘mustard gas’ all over the face, the back, and the arm. There were many others like him: some more, some less severely affected; some newly burned, others older, their sores already caked with thick brown scabs, men and women alike, all horribly disfigured, and little children too. And many blinded by the stuff, with blurred crimson apologies for eyes." provides at least a bit of illumination.
Furthermore, the Spanish Civil War provided a dark continental prelude to what was going to unfold in the coming years. From Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Teruel, Ebro, and Belchite to the bombed-out Guernica, this Francisco Franco-sparked war proved to be a training ground for future Red Army and Wehrmacht (and Luftwaffe) fighters alike.
The fighting between the Nationalists and Republicans, with even the likes of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell traveling to fight with International Brigades, was laid out in harrowing detail in The Dark Valley. This war featured its own litany of atrocities, with deep Spanish divisions between the rightist elements of the Catholic Church and the socialistic left tearing the southern European country apart.
Elements of anarchism and Communism mingled with the anti-Franco forces, ultimately making it difficult to maintain a united front against the Nationalist army and leading to the Republicans' ultimate defeat. To hear The Dark Valley tell it, "...Franco's victory, achieved by April 1, 1939 after the conquest of Catalonia and the collapse of Madrid, was a victory for Hitler. Mussolini shared in it to a lesser extent-Spain had cost Italy far more than Ethiopia. But Pope Pius XII, in a jubilant message to Franco, thanked the Lord for "'Spain's desired Catholic victory.'"
The losers were...the democracies. They had let slip their chance to form a united front with Russia against Germany. They had demonstrated the impotence of international arbitration and led Hitler to believe that he could go on freely expanding in Europe...On his eight-foot long thick desk in the high-ceilinged Bishop's Palace at Salamanca...the Caudillo had framed photographs of the Fuhrer and Duce. In January 1939 Franco told von Richthofen that he would not think of turning to Britain and France because they had "'antiquated political and economic convictions and were declining powers whose methods were not suited to a rising Spain.'"
In Japan, a host of military figures were shown trying to seize control of the country's foreign policy during a time of domestic economic unrest. The invasion of China in 1931, the Mukden incident, and the the subsequent takeover of Manchuria were painted as a sort of Japanese-style Asian Lebensraum. Military cliques led by the likes of Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji and Kwantung Army Intelligence head Seishiro Itagaki were shown to be the real drivers of the country's policies, a sort of return to the behind-the-scenes pre-Meiji days of the shogunate actually determining the emperor's policies.
In Japan itself the book states that, following the early 1930s assassination of Prime Minister Hamaguchi Osachi and the founding of the nationalistic Cherry Blossom Society "...individual assassination and mass murder became instruments of policy." The rearguard actions of liberals and institutionalists like Finance Minister Takahashi Korekiyo and Prince Saionji Kinmochi to prevent the country from fully falling into martial, possibly suicidal hands resembled what was going on simultaneously (to varying degrees of success) in numerous Western capitals.
Possibly the most well-written and moving sections involve everyday life in the Soviet Union during what must have been a hellish decade. The collectivization of agriculture (and the subsequent killing off of nearly forty percent of Kazakhstan's population during this process) and the downright torture of Ukrainian kulaks in particular show how insensible-not to mention insensitive to any human suffering- so many of Joseph Stalin's policies truly were. Russia's obsession with "catching up" to the capitalists countries during what, for many of them, was a lost decade led to a massive upheaval of society and social relationships.
The mass starvation and medieval style living standards of rural Soviet peasants was relayed through the book's strong prose.
"Confused by the conflicting evidence..." Brendon wrote in words evocative of the current Palestinian horrors and explaining how so many Americans and Brits continued to hold Stalinism up as a success while all of this was unfolding, "...many Westerners reckoned that that the reality lay somewhere between the extremes. The best accounts of Russia seemed too good to be true while the worst were surely incredible...The horrors of Soviet life are such that rew people in the Western world could be brought to believe them."
Some Westerners who had idolized Communism, like Andre Gide and Fred Beal, had their illusions shattered upon traveling there. Others like Upton Sinclair and George Bernard Shaw seemed to be more willing to hold onto their illusions of the workers' paradise brought by the Five Year Plan and the stunning Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks.
The one European country which perhaps could have staved off the worse outcomes of a second World War was Great Britain. But it, too, was paralyzed during the 1930s with its own internal problems and remained haunted by memories of the Great War not two decades in the rearview mirror.
While King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had a pageantry-filled state isitt to France in July 1938 in an attempt to show democratic solidarity (the Eiffel Tower even flew the Union Jack), Mussolini's visit to Italy the previous year and Hitler post-Anschluss visit to Italy two months prior to Paris had also been stage-managed presentations of their own, undertaken to demonstrate fascistic solidarity with massive pomp and circumstance.
But the royal family could not paper off the mess British foreign policy was in during this decade. While Winston Churchill took an increasingly anti-Nazi posture as the 1930s wore on, Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain never seemed able to find the backbone to stand up to Hitler or Mussolini when it really could have counted.
The empire's (in hindsight) naive attempts to appease Hitler come in for lengthy examination, with foreign policy hands like Anthony Eden not escaping Brendon's penetrating look. From Addis Ababa to Munich to Vienna to the Sudetenland, there is nonstop goalpost moving and excuse-making as the democracies-which the fascist leaders viewed as weak and decadent-mistakenly felt they were dealing with others in good faith.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to keep Americans upbeat and away from reactionary politics on one hand and too extreme leftist ones on the other played out through his New Deal programs. (The failures of the Coolidge White House to act decisively during the Depression's initial days were outlined early on.)
The Tennessee Valley Authority, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the National Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act; a series of alphabet soup agencies and the men like Henry A. Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, Rexford Tugwell, and Arthur Morgan who were charged with making them a success came in for examination courtesy of Brendon's exhaustive research.
Brendon lauded FDR for abandoning the court packing scheme he had floated, a decision the author indicates coast Roosevelt the ability to gain extremely high levels of support from the broader electorate going forward. He clearly believes FDR handled this economic crisis with more skill than other Western leaders, doing enough in the way of activism to keep the likes of demagogues like Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin from gaining too much power.
The Dark Valley is chock full of societal and political observations from this gloomy decade. Its shortcomings are few, but the author’s employment of cute quotes from one figure after another really does become grating even before the book’s halfway point is reached. These are kind of compelling at first, but the pithy quotes just seem to cheapen some of the surrounding paragraphs.
This does not, however, detract from what is an overall strong piece of nonfiction writing.
The albeit limited portions referenced in this review cannot do justice to the sprawling, impressively detailed nature of The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s.
A key takeaway is the degree to which the Great Depression contributed to so much of this decade's calamities. While it is a counterfactual, there is almost no way the Second World War would have unfolded in the way it did absent this economic calamity.
The fascist's main obsessions were grievances and eliminating "weakness;" one can only wonder how things might have played out differently had the League of Nations and western democracies shown more sternness in the years leading up to Poland's invasion.
It provides about as strong of a feel for this decade as any one volume book can, bringing in a slew of players and outlining a number of inflection points which ultimately produced a Holocaust and World War with tens of millions dead.
This war can only be truly understood and its causes appreciated by reading this incredibly well-researched book.
-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado
January 17, 2016
Piers Brendon deserves praise for writing a mostly readable history of the 1930s that covers the major players in World War Two. The focus is decidedly on Europe with Italy, Germany, France and the UK getting detailed coverage, the United States, Japan, the USSR and Spain fill out the rest.
The book is written in an episodic format with each chapter covering a period of time in one country. On occasion this means that one event is covered multiple times in separate chapters - not necessarily a bad thing when it allows a different perspective on the event. It also means that the narrative weaves back and forth through time: the chapter on France might end in 1936 but the next step in Italy starts in 1931. The effect of both is to make each chapter stand on its own but keeps the whole from quite fitting seamlessly together. Though Brendon does try to knit the chapters together by introducing the country covered in the next chapter in the last pages of the previous this tactic feels clunky more often than not. This is not a showstopper, just something to keep in mind.
The chapters on Japan and Italy are especially strong, possibly because so few writers of popular history have given much attention to either country's experience during the 1930s lately. The chapters on Spain and France are quite good also. Oddly, considering that Brendon is English, the chapters on the UK are surprisingly patchy. The chapters on the United States are, on occasion, a bit odd. Brendon's take on the Supreme Court was surprisingly ill-informed and his sudden segue into Hollywood was downright bizarre. After paying little attention to culture in general Brendon spends pages essentially complaining about the output of the movie factories. I'm still wondering what the line "Even monsters like Boris Karloff and Shirley Temple did not seem credible" is supposed to mean. Does he mean the characters they played? Boris and Shirley as individuals? Is this a bon mot gone flat? Even more strangely, Brendon keeps referencing Citizen Kane, a great movie but one made in 1940 and released in 1941. Pop culture critiques are not Brendon's strength.
The subtitle, A Panorama of the 1930s, is apt. This is not a comprehensive history. What Brendon covers and ignores verges on idiosyncratic at times. He's not trying for completeness but rather to give the reader the feeling of the 1930s: a slow, exorable descent into chaos and ultimately the dark valley of war. The sheer breadth of what the book attempts to cover deserves the attention of any reader interested in the times.
The book is written in an episodic format with each chapter covering a period of time in one country. On occasion this means that one event is covered multiple times in separate chapters - not necessarily a bad thing when it allows a different perspective on the event. It also means that the narrative weaves back and forth through time: the chapter on France might end in 1936 but the next step in Italy starts in 1931. The effect of both is to make each chapter stand on its own but keeps the whole from quite fitting seamlessly together. Though Brendon does try to knit the chapters together by introducing the country covered in the next chapter in the last pages of the previous this tactic feels clunky more often than not. This is not a showstopper, just something to keep in mind.
The chapters on Japan and Italy are especially strong, possibly because so few writers of popular history have given much attention to either country's experience during the 1930s lately. The chapters on Spain and France are quite good also. Oddly, considering that Brendon is English, the chapters on the UK are surprisingly patchy. The chapters on the United States are, on occasion, a bit odd. Brendon's take on the Supreme Court was surprisingly ill-informed and his sudden segue into Hollywood was downright bizarre. After paying little attention to culture in general Brendon spends pages essentially complaining about the output of the movie factories. I'm still wondering what the line "Even monsters like Boris Karloff and Shirley Temple did not seem credible" is supposed to mean. Does he mean the characters they played? Boris and Shirley as individuals? Is this a bon mot gone flat? Even more strangely, Brendon keeps referencing Citizen Kane, a great movie but one made in 1940 and released in 1941. Pop culture critiques are not Brendon's strength.
The subtitle, A Panorama of the 1930s, is apt. This is not a comprehensive history. What Brendon covers and ignores verges on idiosyncratic at times. He's not trying for completeness but rather to give the reader the feeling of the 1930s: a slow, exorable descent into chaos and ultimately the dark valley of war. The sheer breadth of what the book attempts to cover deserves the attention of any reader interested in the times.
May 16, 2017
Like a lot of the great works in the "epic" narrative history tradition, this book thrives when it properly balances opera-buffa set pieces and zany characters with gravitas and well-reasoned analysis. Brendon has a rare eye for astonishing, often morbidly humorous anecdotal details which enrich his recreations of familiar events. For example, during his account of the formation of the Soviet-Nazi pact, he pauses the action for a hilarious (and true!) aside about the Soviets' faulty camera flash. Brendon's love of lurid fun facts occasionally threatens to overshadow the solid historical work it's rooted in, especially in the chapters about Britain, which carry a tone of acidic, bitchy sarcasm that readers of Brendon's other famous work "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire" will be familiar with. The vast scope of the topics covered in this book makes reading it feel at times like you're on one of those Disney World "story rides" that takes you past meticulous recreations of the highlights of a particular film, except instead of passing by the scene where Peter Pan and the kids fly over London, and then moving on to the scene on the pirate ship, you instead make a short, intense trip to Stalin's great purges and then are swept far away to whatever Japan's up to around that same time, which can provoke readerly whiplash. Still, if you want a comprehensive, but accessible and often thrilling history of the period that lead to WW2, this is the first place you should turn.
October 30, 2009
A monumental history of the Depression and the march towards war, covering the period from the stock market crash in late 1929 until the German tanks rolled into Poland in September, 1939. It is astoundingly good. Brendon is a masterful storyteller with a gift for both synthesis and exposition. His short, biographical sketches of the major players of the period are themselves worth the price of admission. Indeed, his introduction of Churchill (pages 604-610) should be taught in the universities as an example of history writing at its best. I read this passage, reread it, then read it aloud to my wife, simply for its pure entertainment value. The rest of the book is no less interesting. Brendon, like a master film noir director, plunges us deep into the shadows of that 'dark, dishonest decade', detailing, chapter by chapter, the causes and consequences of the events that would soon lead to war. He explores the fears, the motives, the blindness, and yes, the cowardice, of those who might have put a stop to Hitler, and exposes the moral rot and the incipient evil that finally made war inevitable. It's a tremendous book, a tremendous ride.
February 5, 2009
To be perfectly honest, I would never have evn touched this book if it was required reading for a class that had few requirements. That siad upon reading it I actually enjoyed it. It was sry and packed full of infromation to the point of being an Atlas with sentences, but it was fun. Tid bits and stories of some of the major characters gave the well needed comic relief. Again to be perfectly honest this book really accomplished its hob well meaning that it made me well ready for the test. My point is this, if I was not reading this book for schoolI probably would not have liked it as much nor would I have gien it a try.
November 27, 2022
One of those tomes one can read to rediscover the present. At several points in this thorough examination of the 1930s, resonance can be found with the present. I'm not a devotee of the Toynbee formulation about repeating history---I don't believe forgetting history dooms us to repeat it. Rather we simply never escape it.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
May 17, 2020
“Nincompoop” isn’t a word you come across in many history books, if at all. This author uses it, and when he does this fun word captures all that needed to be said. This is an engaging, masterful, and thorough history (political, not cultural) of the 1930s. An alternative title (and you can come up with many as you read this book) could be “the age of obfuscation,” but considering our contemporary politics, obfuscation isn’t unique to the ‘30s. This is a detailed history of a decade of “make-believe and spiritual betrayal” where in some countries it was safer to “believe everything but the facts.”
Chapters are devoted to each country (Germany, Italy, Japan, England, France, the Soviet Union, & the U.S) enabling the author to provide extensive comparisons between leaders and economic & political movements and programs. The author, in a few paragraphs or pages, gives informative biographical sketches of individuals, such as Hoover, FDR, Himmler, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Mao,& many others.
I found the back to back chapters on Stalin and FDR an early high point in the book as were the chapters on Japan. I think the author’s review of how Mussolini, Hitler, & Stalin came to power and their approaches to leadership is a reminder of how easy it is for an authoritarian to rise to power during a period of crises, or perceived crises. A common tool for each of these men was a weakening (or destruction of a free press) by making a free media an enemy of the state, calling their news fake, and spreading falsehoods as truth. Stalin, for example, was a master at covering up the mass starvation he caused by spreading falsehoods as truths and removing those who knew otherwise.
I also found the author’s comments on the Munich agreement revealing. Until I read this book, I did not fully understand the global impact of this agreement.
Sometimes I felt the minutiae of details was too much, but overall the comprehensiveness of the author immerses the reader in the events and personalities of the decade and, as a consequence, after you’re halfway through the book you begin to feel the tension building to the events of ‘39.
After completing this book, I think potential readers may want to start with the last chapter, the Conclusion. This is an excellent, concise summary of the covered period and may entice readers who are initially put off by the number of pages and the subject matter. It’s also a succinct analysis of the global significance of the Great Depression.
Chapters are devoted to each country (Germany, Italy, Japan, England, France, the Soviet Union, & the U.S) enabling the author to provide extensive comparisons between leaders and economic & political movements and programs. The author, in a few paragraphs or pages, gives informative biographical sketches of individuals, such as Hoover, FDR, Himmler, Hitler, Mussolini, Chamberlain, Mao,& many others.
I found the back to back chapters on Stalin and FDR an early high point in the book as were the chapters on Japan. I think the author’s review of how Mussolini, Hitler, & Stalin came to power and their approaches to leadership is a reminder of how easy it is for an authoritarian to rise to power during a period of crises, or perceived crises. A common tool for each of these men was a weakening (or destruction of a free press) by making a free media an enemy of the state, calling their news fake, and spreading falsehoods as truth. Stalin, for example, was a master at covering up the mass starvation he caused by spreading falsehoods as truths and removing those who knew otherwise.
I also found the author’s comments on the Munich agreement revealing. Until I read this book, I did not fully understand the global impact of this agreement.
Sometimes I felt the minutiae of details was too much, but overall the comprehensiveness of the author immerses the reader in the events and personalities of the decade and, as a consequence, after you’re halfway through the book you begin to feel the tension building to the events of ‘39.
After completing this book, I think potential readers may want to start with the last chapter, the Conclusion. This is an excellent, concise summary of the covered period and may entice readers who are initially put off by the number of pages and the subject matter. It’s also a succinct analysis of the global significance of the Great Depression.
August 8, 2022
There are a number of detailed reviews of this book online already, so I won't go into any real detail regarding the contents, as it'd be fairly redundant. I simply want to add my voice to the chorus of approval.
Like William Shirer's justly celebrated ‘Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich’ this is sweeping, compelling history that really draws you in. The kind of thing that'll threaten to end your fiction reading. Why read fiction when real world events are so massively interesting?
The 1930s were, of course, the crucible of WWII, with extreme nationalist governments taking over ever larger swathes of the world: Italy, Spain and Japan were joined in this decade by Germany, and all these major powers can be added to the giants of Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. There was the fallout of worldwide recession, and all around the world, but most surprisingly perhaps, in the 'developed' West, liberalism and democracy were in crisis.
As others have noted elsewhere, Brendon has an excellent writing style, and is truly masterful at weaving together complex narrative and small anecdotal details. What a period the first half of the C20th was, with all this and more sandwiched between the cataclysms of two world wars! I borrowed this from a friend many years ago, and liked it so much I had to get my own copy after reading his (in a repeat of what had already happened with the aforementioned Shirer book).
The material relating to Japan is, I find, particularly fascinating, as so much English historical literature on this period and the two world wars is so Euro-centric. Also the militarism of Japan differed markedly from that of Russia, Germany and Italy, in that it was much more broad based, rather than being focussed on a singular charismatic figurehead. Indeed, the Japanese Emperor seems to have been carried along on a martial current that flowed through a whole class (the officer class), ultimately more or less saturating the whole culture.
One specific episode amongst the many in this brilliant book that really struck me - haunted me even, for a little while after reading it - was the horror of Magnitogorsk (just the name sounds balefully ominous!), in Stalinist Russia, which was declared a closed city, i.e. off limits to foreigners, in 1937. I won't say why. Get a copy of this superb book and read about it yourself!
Like William Shirer's justly celebrated ‘Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich’ this is sweeping, compelling history that really draws you in. The kind of thing that'll threaten to end your fiction reading. Why read fiction when real world events are so massively interesting?
The 1930s were, of course, the crucible of WWII, with extreme nationalist governments taking over ever larger swathes of the world: Italy, Spain and Japan were joined in this decade by Germany, and all these major powers can be added to the giants of Russia and, to a lesser extent, China. There was the fallout of worldwide recession, and all around the world, but most surprisingly perhaps, in the 'developed' West, liberalism and democracy were in crisis.
As others have noted elsewhere, Brendon has an excellent writing style, and is truly masterful at weaving together complex narrative and small anecdotal details. What a period the first half of the C20th was, with all this and more sandwiched between the cataclysms of two world wars! I borrowed this from a friend many years ago, and liked it so much I had to get my own copy after reading his (in a repeat of what had already happened with the aforementioned Shirer book).
The material relating to Japan is, I find, particularly fascinating, as so much English historical literature on this period and the two world wars is so Euro-centric. Also the militarism of Japan differed markedly from that of Russia, Germany and Italy, in that it was much more broad based, rather than being focussed on a singular charismatic figurehead. Indeed, the Japanese Emperor seems to have been carried along on a martial current that flowed through a whole class (the officer class), ultimately more or less saturating the whole culture.
One specific episode amongst the many in this brilliant book that really struck me - haunted me even, for a little while after reading it - was the horror of Magnitogorsk (just the name sounds balefully ominous!), in Stalinist Russia, which was declared a closed city, i.e. off limits to foreigners, in 1937. I won't say why. Get a copy of this superb book and read about it yourself!
October 27, 2024
Uma obra simultaneamente extensa e limitada. Extensa pois tem mais de 600 páginas de texto denso impresso em caracteres quase microscópicos; limitada porque se circunscreve à década de 30 do século passado e se centra somente em 7 países (Alemanha, Estados Unidos, França, Grã-Bretanha, Itália, Japão e URSS (com abordagens colaterais, tão pontuais quanto inevitáveis, da guerra civil de Espanha e do conflito sino-japonês). O quadro geral traçado por Brenton é bem estruturado, rigoroso e consistente e em termos globais o livro é sério, bem informado e instrutivo. As suas únicas falhas (que podem, porém, ser também vistas como qualidades) são a sua vertente anedótica e a atenção que é prestada ás idiossincrasias das individualidades que marcaram a década. Com o claro intuito de aligeirar o texto e o tornar mais facilmente digerível, Brentron não se limita a referir a importância da acção desenvolvida por aquelas individualidades e das decisões por elas tomadas, mas descreve também sumariamente o seu trajecto político e o seu aspecto físico (atribuindo uma inusitada relevância às mãos…). Certamente com o mesmo objectivo, intercala as suas análises com relatos de circunstâncias e factos periféricos, às quais atribui um carácter simbólico, e multiplica as citações quase sempre "espirituosas" ou plenas de verve.
February 13, 2024
Dark Valley is Piers Brendon’s masterful account of the 1930’s that led directly to the cataclysm of WWII. From the Great Depression’s erosion of fragile democracies ( see Italy and the Weimar Republic) to Franco’s victory in the Spanish civil war, Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia (and the feckless collapse of the League of Nations) and the Japanese invasion of China to Stalin’s murderous purges there ensued a steady march to global war. The democracies utterly failed to respond. Not to Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland nor the Anschluss with Austria nor the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. France and Great Britain were too traumatized by the costs of the previous world war and the U.S. was engulfed in a spasm of intense isolationism. Had they reacted forcefully in 1938 in the Rhineland Hitler might have been toppled and war averted. A lesson we might apply to Ukraine today. The author’s juicy sketches of major figures like Molotov, Ribbentrop, Cianno, Mussolini, Konoe, Mao and Beria is strikingly instructive as events unfold. This is the best account of this era I’ve ever read.
February 16, 2018
This lengthy book about the 30s could easily have been titled A Long Day's Journey into Night. The author's thesis is that the Great Depression spurred the development of totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the democratic states for the same reason lacked the will to control the situation before it broke out into a world war. Each chapter focuses on one of the major warring factions: Japan, USSR, Germany, Italy, France, UK, and US. Obviously it is impossible to include everything from this period, but the author instead of treading the much rutted road brings in new perspectives that modern readers lack because the historical record has been telescoped and shortened. For example, the Western allies shameful early embrace of Franco and Mussolini is detailed. Another example shows Chaing Kai Shek was not the benevolent leader that other have portrayed him as. Also, Chamberlain's over eager appeasement not on in Munich but several other. To be sure, the book is not a quick read but is insightful.
March 26, 2018
This book came to my attention after reading another great_though decidedly with a different focus_ book about the 1930's, 'The Boys in the Boat', having pored through its extensive bibliography and therefore coming across the intriguingly titled: 'The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930's'.
Overall, this book definitely did not disappoint and I would read it all over again. The narrative of the book caught me a bit off guard at first (this is my first book by Piers Brendon), seeing how descriptive it is on almost every page, offering intimate details of many of the major characters of the tumultuous decade and interwar years while still managing to explain the complex dynamics behind all the decisions and actions taken amongst the major powers (Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, US, China and Japan) at the time.
It is a book with a rich tapestry, never dry, and a narrative befitting of the grandioseness of the era.
Overall, this book definitely did not disappoint and I would read it all over again. The narrative of the book caught me a bit off guard at first (this is my first book by Piers Brendon), seeing how descriptive it is on almost every page, offering intimate details of many of the major characters of the tumultuous decade and interwar years while still managing to explain the complex dynamics behind all the decisions and actions taken amongst the major powers (Germany, France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Russia, US, China and Japan) at the time.
It is a book with a rich tapestry, never dry, and a narrative befitting of the grandioseness of the era.
August 14, 2023
Yes, this book took me two months to finish, but it was well worth the time.
As the title mentions, it gives you a panorama of the 1930s, some countries taking a bit more space than others- England and America are going through a Great Depression and some political dramas (they are honorable mentions compared to the others), while Japan is raging against China, Russia against its own and the Ukraine, Germany setting the course for war, and Italy against Ethiopia.
Within each of the very long chapters for the Big Six, we are given a fascinating look into each country and what motivates them and how those motivations and reactions lead to what we know as the 20th century.
Highly recommend.
As the title mentions, it gives you a panorama of the 1930s, some countries taking a bit more space than others- England and America are going through a Great Depression and some political dramas (they are honorable mentions compared to the others), while Japan is raging against China, Russia against its own and the Ukraine, Germany setting the course for war, and Italy against Ethiopia.
Within each of the very long chapters for the Big Six, we are given a fascinating look into each country and what motivates them and how those motivations and reactions lead to what we know as the 20th century.
Highly recommend.
December 30, 2024
Piers Brendon’s account of the 1930s was thoroughly researched and I thought the overall organization of the book was well put together. Brendon’s ability to weave the stories of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, China, and the Soviet Union into one coherent account of the lead up to the Second World War is no small feat. My only complaint (beside the overuse of the words “bespectacled” and “holocaust”) was the overuse of historical references in passing. While I appreciated most of them (admittedly there were some that went over my head and I had to look them up), I found them to be too distracting from the main point and often times Brendon went into unnecessary biographical depth. All that being said, I would highly recommend this book!
May 14, 2024
Det tog mig lång tid att läsa klart denna bjässe, men det är inget större problem att läsa del för del.
Oerhört faktatung, men ibland kastas det fram namn utan titlar eller i oklara sammanhang vilket gör att det är svårt att hänga med.
Aktörerna beskrivs värderande och ingående, men ibland är det oklart varför detaljerna är viktiga - dock gör det inte så mycket då kuriosan är även spännande.
En stor brist är att Molotov-Ribbentrop-paktens "hemliga" del glöms bort (igen). Att Polen och att Finland angrips av Sovjetunionen verkar sällan vara relevant när det skall betonas att Stalin "skyddar" sin västra gräns.
Oerhört faktatung, men ibland kastas det fram namn utan titlar eller i oklara sammanhang vilket gör att det är svårt att hänga med.
Aktörerna beskrivs värderande och ingående, men ibland är det oklart varför detaljerna är viktiga - dock gör det inte så mycket då kuriosan är även spännande.
En stor brist är att Molotov-Ribbentrop-paktens "hemliga" del glöms bort (igen). Att Polen och att Finland angrips av Sovjetunionen verkar sällan vara relevant när det skall betonas att Stalin "skyddar" sin västra gräns.
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