The Dark Valley - Couverture rigide

Piers Bendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark, dishonest decade, child of one world war and parent of the next, that determined the course of the twentieth century.

Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil, when Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendam and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope and modernity after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold.

From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine, the American Dust Bowl, to the Tokyo earthquake, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, The Dark Valley examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a meticulous chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then. We see the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the sufferings they endured.

"A fantastic, sweeping history of the 1930s... Brendon is a superb writer, taking an exceptionally complex, dense topic and building a compelling narrative." (John Stepek Money Week)

"The best history book I've read since Orlando Figes's' A People's Tragedy...wonderful and enthralling." (Ruth Rendell Daily Telegraph)

"Brilliant, cinematic, utterly illuminating... No other historical account I know can rival this... Masterly." (Valentine Cunningham Financial Times)

"A delight to read, a literary triumph sparkling with moments of real humour and compassion." (Richard Overy Sunday Telegraph)

"Piers Brendon's long book has such brilliance and narrative power, and contains so much fascinating detail, that reading it has all the excitement of novelty." (John Grigg Evening Standard)