Piers Brendon

This book was dense. I liked it, but it took me 2 months to read it (granted, with much else going on).

It's definitely one of those books written from the stance that there are no good guys in history. Well, people that do good, but... Eh.

Very interesting; while the US has never had the colonial reach of GB, there are definitely some parallels (some). In that thread, it is interesting to become aware of ones own thinking following earlier reflections re: The decline of Romam Empire --> The show more decline of the British Empire --> The decline of the US... Hegemony.

But dense! show less

Brendon tried to the impossible with this book- there's just no way anyone can squeeze a decade as crazy as the thirties into one book. Given that though, he did a great job of laying out the facts. But don't come to this book expecting explanation. The vast majority of it reads like the work of an immensely talented autodidact historian who has completely lost his ability to follow a thought through an entire paragraph. This is seemingly by design- "this tome," Brendon says, "is a parcel of show more epitomies," he claims to "accumulate personal minutiae" and conjures up "the contemporary experience... via detail of the clothes people wore, the food they ate, the cigarettes they smoked." All of which is great if you want a 'feeling for the period', but pretty dismal and dull if you want to know *why* something happened. He's obviously capable of explaining the whys of history, as the final chapter on the Nazi-Soviet pact makes clear. I just wish he'd done more of that, and spent less time on the details of Blum's cigarettes, Churchill's dinners, or the endless (and hilarious) follies of prominent Nazis.
As a side note, this somewhat ADD-style of piling up anecdotes also makes the writing less wonderful than it could have been. Brendon's obviously a talented stylist, but it's difficult to appreciate that when every sentence introduces a new epitome, rather than building on previous sentences, every paragraph introduces a new anecdote rather than explaining more fully the previous paragraph, and so on. show less

Piers Brendon's "panorama" of the years leading up to WWII is intelligent, comprehensive, thoughtful, and frightening. Brendon does not shy from the brutal facts of brutish power, or the newfound abilities of that power to manipulate people through new mass media and technologies. Democracies and dictatorships alike lied with effect, including the most destructive of self-deceits. Well-written snd accessible, The Dark Valley should be in the library of every leader and citizen.

This is a wide-ranging and ambitious book about a topic that I personally find fascinating.Overall, it is terrific, so let me point out the one or two small flaws that keep me from a five star rating. Because the books range is so wide, naturally there are limits to what the author could cover thoroughly. So there are few places where I caught him taking some research "short cuts," i.e. using fictional accounts as examples without clearly indicating that they were fiction. If this were a show more history textbook, this would be inexcusable, but since the fictional sources were clearly cited for the careful reader to identify and this is, after all, a readable popular account rather than an academic text, I think these are minor problems in an otherwise remarkably well-written and readable book. show less