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The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s Hardcover – Big Book, October 3, 2000
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It was a decade dominated worldwide by the Great Depression, by unemployment and hardship; a time when human achievement was matched by pervasive fear; when the great neon metaphors of hope that rose up after World War I--Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfürstendamm, the Ginza--grew dim both literally and figuratively. It was a decade during which darkness often masqueraded as light--Hitler's abolition of unemployment in Germany; Stalin's plans for progress and social equality in Russia; Mussolini's "revival" of Italy--while governments established and maintained control through brutal physical repression and the more nsidious, lasting repressions of truth: sanctioned deception and relentless propaganda. It was a decade during which a diffuse economic and social crisis condensed into a massive political and military storm.
Focusing individually on each of the primary staging grounds for history during the 1930s--the United States, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Russia and Spain--Piers Brendon traces the particular and diverse experiences of the decade. Political and economic circumstances form the framework of this breathtaking work of scholarship, but it is also the story of people: both of crucial figures--Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Roosevelt, Franco, Chiang Kai-Shek and Mussolini, to name a few--and of a secondary, but no less fascinating, cast of characters, including George Orwell, Leni Riefenstahl and Ernest Hemingway. Brendon vividly conjures the texture and tone of life in places as far-flung as Paris and Kyoto, Vienna and Shanghai, Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains and Norris in the Tennessee Valley. He depicts the circumstances of the Ukrainian famine and the American Dust Bowl, the Night of the Long Knives and the conquest of Ethiopia, the bombing of Guernica, the Anschluss and the great Soviet purges. He describes the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the books and newspapers they read, the work they did or lacked, the beliefs they held, the pleasures they enjoyed, the sufferings they endured.
The public sphere and the personal realm, the collective lives of nations and the details of individual lives--each element of the book contributes to its brilliant elucidation of the ways in which, during the 1930s, political power obscured knowledge, economic catastrophe darkened understanding and the foundation was laid for the most profound and far-reaching crisis of modern times.
The Dark Valley is a revelation of the ten years that set the course for the remainder of the twentieth
century.
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Print length816 pages
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LanguageEnglish
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PublisherKnopf
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Publication dateOctober 3, 2000
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Dimensions6.5 x 2 x 9.5 inches
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ISBN-100375408819
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ISBN-13978-0375408816
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Review
“Page by page this synoptic tour de force…propels the reader towards the inevitable cataclysms of the ‘40s.”–Time
“An innovative format, a wealth of detail gleaned from prodigious research, and stylistic gifts worthy of a great novelist…gives Brendon’s book a magisterial quality unmatched by other histories of the period.”–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Brilliantly written and meticulously researched, The Dark Valley provides a depth of understanding of the misery of the Great Depression that few Americans alive today can grasp.” —The Denver Post
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Publisher
-- The 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."
-- Evening Standard
"Historians are seldom thought of as elegant stylists, let alone as comic writers of the first rank. Piers Brendon is both . . . [He has] an eye for the telling detail that puts most novelists to shame."
-- Sunday Express
"Piers Brendon's book, let's say it at once, is a tour de force . . . The book could hardly be better."
-- The Scotsman
"Lively, fascinating . . . In telling his tale of the Thirties, Brendon paints a vivid and vigorous canvas . . . His character sketches of the principal players are sharp, perceptive, and often very funny."
-- The Observer
"Distinctive and enthralling . . . Brendon's sweep and range are breathtakingly global. His story takes in everything and everywhere that matters between the 20th century's two world wars, moving with knowledge, insight, and wit . . . His detail--brilliant, cinematic, utterly illuminating--is arranged with a canny storyteller's knack. No other historical account I know can rival this fluently possessive sequence."
-- Financial Times
"A cleverly sustained, and often moving account . . . familiar in its substance but fresh in its imagery."
-- The Sunday Times [London]
"[An] excellent survey of the Thirties . . . Brendon tells the story of this enormous and weighty subject with great skill and good humour."
-- Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad
"Endlessly fascinating."
-- Literary Review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Well before dawn on 21 February 1916, when powdery snow lightened the darkness shrouding the lines of trenches gashed across the face of northern France, a 15-inch Krupp naval gun fired the first shot in the battle of Verdun. Its long barrel rising through the camouflage netting of its hiding-place in a wood near Loisin, it gave a full-throated roar and vomited a huge projectile 15 miles into the fortified city. The shell burst in the courtyard of the Bishop's Palace, "knocking a corner off the cathedral".
Others followed but not until sunrise did the main German bombardment begin. In the dead silence moments before the onslaught, French soldiers of the 56th and 59th Light Infantry Battalions, dug into a bosky hillside north of Verdun known as the Bois des Caures, saw snow fall from trembling branches. Then they were engulfed by a tornado of fire and steel. The barrage could be heard a hundred miles away in the Vosges Mountains, "an incessant rumble of drums, punctuated by the pounding of big basses."
Close at hand its impact was tremendous. One of the earliest victims was a water carrier who, with his horse and cart, was blown to smithereens by a direct hit from one of the 1,200 German guns. His comrades expected the same fate as they clung to the earth and, Jules Romains wrote, breathed "the smell of a tormented world, a smell like that of a planet in the process of being reduced to ashes."
The trenches of the First World War have been compared to the concentration camps of the Second. So they were, in the sense that they witnessed bestial suffering. By that analogy Verdun was Auschwitz.
Actually Verdun was not the bloodiest battle of the war--that grisly distinction belongs to the Somme. Moreover, the carnage was so unspeakable elsewhere, notably on the Eastern Front, that governments sought refuge in censorship and lies, reporters dealt in euphemisms like "baptism of fire" and even poets felt lost for words. In every sector the combatants saw a new vision of hell, experienced an "iron nightmare."
They occupied killing fields in which the quick and the dead were buried in the same stretch of tortured soil, men gouging holes in the ground like the rats which fed on corpses regularly exhumed by scorching metal. Amid the stench and squalor of a gigantic shambles, legions of doomed youth emerged to be scythed down by machine-guns and crucified on barbed wire. They endured an inferno of shells: shrapnel which tore flesh to pieces and high explosive which pulverised bone and stone alike. They encountered the hideous inventions of perverted technology: flame-throwers and poison gas. Even in so-called "quiet sectors" of the line, those in which (one French officer complained) generals "plague us with their visits."
A 2nd lieutenant's commission was, as Wyndham Lewis said, tantamount to a death warrant. Yet, even taking Passchendaele into account, Verdun was the most terrible battle of the war. This was because of time and space: it lasted longest and was most concentrated. It continued at maximum intensity for much of 1916 and erupted sporadically until the armistice. And the kind of fighting which no one chronicled with more Zolaesque vehemence than Henri Barbusse was aimed at a single target on the narrowest of fronts: the woods are sliced down like cornfields, the dug-outs marked and burst in even when they've three thicknesses of beams . . . all the roads blown into the air and changed into long heaps of smashed convoys and wrecked guns, corpses twisted together as though shovelled up. You could see thirty chaps laid out by one shot at the crossroads; you could see fellows whirling around as they went up, always about fifteen yards, and bits of trousers caught and stuck on the tops of the trees that were left . . . And that went on for months on end, months on end!
Probably more soldiers were killed per square yard in defence of Verdun, symbol of French honour, than in any other conflict before or since. The figures are difficult to compute, but nearly 300,000 Frenchmen and Germans died and another 450,000 were wounded. The German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn, thus fulfilled his ambition to bleed the enemy white. Admittedly, his own forces paid an almost equally horrifying price. But the French armies, most of which were sooner or later dragged into the charnel-house of Verdun, suffered more. They were crushed by a weight of artillery "against which courage had no resource."
Soon hopes of glory gave way to talk of butchery. French soldiers had entered the war with sublime faith in the offensive, symbolised by their red képis and pantaloons (where the British wore khaki and the Germans grey). Now some began to think in terms of a defensive strategy whereby casualties would be kept to a minimum. The embodiment of this philosophy was General Philippe Pétain. Pétain was given command at Verdun when a German breakthrough seemed imminent. A peasant's son with a patrician's air, he looked every inch a general--always an important consideration with the military. He was a large, impassive man with icy blue eyes, a sweeping white moustache and pale, marmoreal features. As Pétain himself acknowledged, "I have a chilling mask."
Coldness, indeed, was the characteristic which this stoical soldier presented to the world: he treated politicians with glacial disdain and adopted a frigid formality with his staff. But passions seethed beneath Pétain's arctic exterior. He had many love affairs, often with other men's wives and once with a woman apparently procured for him by the Germans. When summoned to Verdun he was nowhere to be found; his ADC finally tracked him down in the Hotel Terminus at the Gare du Nord in Paris. Outside a bedroom door he was able to identify "the great commander's yellowish boots with the long leggings, which, however, on that evening were agreeably accompanied by some charming little molière slippers, utterly feminine."
Being, as a friend once said, more of a slave to his flesh than to his duty, Pétain insisted on finishing the business of the night. But once at Verdun he showed a stern regard for the flesh of the French poilu. He limited losses, relying on matériel rather than men. He acted defensively, reorganising the artillery and keeping it well supplied with ammunition. He constantly sent fresh troops to relieve those exhausted by the attrition of the firing line. He visited casualty clearing stations--unlike the British Commander-in-Chief, Douglas Haig, who felt it his duty not to sicken himself by such experiences. Eventually Pétain became the "saviour of Verdun." He thus earned himself lasting fame and popularity. In 1935 he came top of a newspaper poll conducted to find a dictator for France. However, Pétain's methods were anathema to the offensive-minded high command. So, in April 1917, General Robert Nivelle was permitted to launch another frontal attack, this time against well-protected German lines on the Aisne. It was a disaster. Though incurring a modest loss compared to the hecatombs of Verdun, it broke the fighting spirit of the French armies. Two-thirds of their units were now affected by mutinies. These ranged from minor acts of indiscipline to violent disturbances. Some troops sang the "Internationale" and proposed to march on Paris. But most were protesting against the slaughter caused by futile assaults on heavily fortified positions. The authorities effectively hushed up the mutinies, punishing the ring-leaders (50 of whom were executed) and making concessions (more leave, better food) to the rest. But this spontaneous insurrection terrified the leaders of France, because it raised the twin ghouls of defeat and revolution. Pétain himself, infected by a pessimism that amounted to defeatism, muttered that France should begin peace negotiations. As it happened, all belligerent nations experienced mutinies or considered peace proposals in 1917. But it was in France, whose poignant war memorials would record the loss of 1.3 million soldiers (over a quarter of all men aged between 18 and 27), that the mood of war-weariness was overwhelming. That mood was prophetically expressed by a character in Barbusse's Under Fire who exclaimed: The future, the future! The work of the future will be to wipe out the present, to wipe it out more than we can imagine, to wipe it out like something abominable and shameful . . . Shame on military glory, shame on armies, shame on the soldier's calling that changes men by turns into stupid victims and ignoble brutes.
Looking forward to the arrival of the Americans, French poilus were for the present prepared at least to defend the motherland. And defence was later to be elevated to the status of a cult, its fetish being the Maginot Line, modelled on the fortresses which had protected Verdun. But hostility to war and, by extension, to the military, became so widespread during the 1920s and '30s that cadets at St. Cyr were advised to doff their uniforms and go out wearing civilian clothes. Verdun spawned a feeling in France, so passionate as to be palpable, that this must be the war to end war. As a young lieutenant wrote in his diary just before his death in that battle, "They will not be able to make us do it again."
The Great War invaded the mind of mankind, becoming "the essential condition of consciousness in the twentieth century."
The pain and grief of Verdun, in particular, seared the French psyche like phosgene gas in a soldier's lungs. People had their own recurring nightmares: of men drowning in shell-holes; or walking on corpses during an attack; or going mad in the underground fighting in Forts Vaux and Douaumont; or being more anguished by their horses' suffering than by their own; or collapsing from hunger, thirst and exhaustion when supplies failed to reach the front line; or weeping ju...
Product details
- Publisher : Knopf (October 3, 2000)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 816 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0375408819
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375408816
- Item Weight : 2.95 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 2 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #627,922 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #16,151 in World History (Books)
- #20,225 in United States History (Books)
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Fairly early on, Author Brendon observes, "Cutting up the past and labeling the snippets is one way of trying to impose order on the flux of history. Doubtless it is always unsatisfactory - ages merge, epithets mislead." Of course, he then proceeds to demonstrate that while his assessment might be true for most historians, it certainly is not for him. Think of the `snippets' as fine but unformed threads and of Brendon as a master weaver; the result is a tapestry that takes a reader's breath away. Simply superb.
The presence of so many thoughtful and incisive reviews requires that I add my own two cents in the form of a cavil: both Brendon here and Timothy Snyder in "Bloodlands" refer to the Russian pistol which was used to such stunning effect in ridding Stalin of his enemies as the "Nagan." It is, rather, the "Nagant," ending with a `t.' Big deal, eh? At least it shows I'm a careful reader (and, not surprisingly, that neither the Cambridge nor Yale libraries stock copies of "Firearms of the World").
I am both a careful, and an unfulfilled, reader. Brendon can't do much about it now; his work is done. But I sure would have enjoyed another couple hundred pages of this marvelous piece of History writing. I have read so many books that I thought were wonderful that I'm always hesitant to call this or that `one of the best.' I have no such hesitation here: at or near the very top of the list. If you haven't read it, give yourself a treat. Just be warned about `wanting more.'
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 answer to my amazement, at least partially, is that Brendon writes with the consummate skill of a narrative historian. That is to say, one becomes caught up in the story of this stygian decade as one gets caught up in the works of, say, Faulkner. I really can't laud his stylism too much. He captures all the important details, the diplomatic démarches, the shifts and schisms within rulers and ruled with a rare combination of élan, erudition and, at precisely the right moments, humour that the book can only be called page-turning Euhemerism.
Also, as befits its subject matter, the work is indeed Avernal. There are many "dark valleys" strewn throughout this account from which Brendon may have taken the title for the work, but my favourite candidates are the "himitsu-no-tani" - "ravines that never see the sun" mentioned in the first chapter on Japan which "grew with primeval density" and where "poachers who tried to steal a twig could be shot on sight." They seem the most apt metaphor for the abyssal conditions in the decade through which Brendon guides the reader so magisterially.
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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.