The Dark Valley. A Panorama of the 1930s

London England: Jonathan Cape. Fine/Very Good. 2000. Reprint. Cloth. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Octavo 0224060384 Hardback Hardback. First Edition. The Dark Valley. A Panorama of the 1930s. Slight shelf wear to top edge of D/J. Price clipped to D/J. . The author'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, Russia and Spain - the author takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil, when Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfustendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the fiants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, this book brings the 1930s back to life through meticulous scholarship. Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin. Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, Haile Selassie and countless othes - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living them. We see the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the sufferings they endured. Throughout a central theme emerges. The 1930s were a time of systematic obfuscation. Governments fought to maintain control by manipulating minds. Propaganda became part of the ait people breathed. This book investigatesd how, and how far, contemporaries knew that they knew, and the extent to which our own view of the time is fogged by their uncertainty. It illuminates a period when the world was struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another, the greatest in its history. Illustrated. 701 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions, Reference books ,and all types of Academic Literature.) .