Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of 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 - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil, when the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took 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, "The Dark Valley brings the 1930s back to life with meticulous scholarship.
