The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s
by Piers Brendon

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Book Reviews of The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

Book Review: An epic book about a dark, dishonest decade
Summary: 5 Stars

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.

Summary of The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s

20th Century Books

• Subjects > History > Americas > United States > 20th Century
• Europe
• World