In the original dustsheet. Black cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feeling and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available

An excellent book.

A panoramic study of a pivotal decade in twentieth-century history explores a time dominated by the Great Depression, political unrest, social upheaval, repression, and the coming of World War II; profiles the key figures of the era–Hitler, Roosevelt, Mao, Stalin, and Franco, among others–and the events, movements, and attitudes that shaped the world.

Review: Having found Piers Brendon’s  ‘The Decline and Fall of the British Empire’  an entertaining and informative read I turned with a sense of expectation to his earlier work: a global history of Auden’s low dishonest decade “The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s”.

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) throughout the decade that led 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 oversimplifying 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.