Piers Brendon'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 Spain and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway Piccadilly Circus the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants 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 The Dark Valley brings the 1930's back to life through meticulous scholarship.

Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler Stalin Mussolini Mao Tse-Tung Haile Selassie and countless others - 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 then.