| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : NOVEMBER 6, 2000 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
Prelude to War THE DARK VALLEY A Panorama of the 1930s By Piers Brendon Knopf -- 795pp -- $35 Consider Herman Goring, Adolf Hitler's No. 2. A onetime morphine addict, he did a spell in a Swedish lunatic asylum. Goring was a man of massive appetites and contradictions. While sending citizens to death camps, he issued regulations forbidding cruelty to animals. Peroxided, powdered, and rouged, he dressed in comic opera gear--violet kimonos, purple togas, and green silk pantaloons hitched up with gem-encrusted belts. He was, writes Piers Brendon in The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, the greatest plunderer of Europe since Napoleon. And he had suitable features: Goring's hands, said American diplomat Sumner Welles, ''were shaped like the digging paws of a badger.'' All of this rich material comes from only one paragraph in Brendon's magisterial volume on the darkest decade of the past century. In nearly 800 pages, the Cambridge historian leads readers on a tour of madness and despair as the world staggers toward the greatest bloodbath ever. The book covers the important players, from the imperial wannabes of Germany, Italy, and Japan to the exhausted and demoralized democrats in France and Britain. We see Stalin's Soviet Union positioning itself for the fight, and a Depression-ridden America shielding its eyes to the horrors--or at least trying to. It's gripping material, and Brendon writes with the assurance of a novelist. He develops characters, slows down to describe interesting scenes, and demonstrates a fine eye for detail and irony. For instance, there's King George V, ''conservative to the point of ossification,'' who was heard saying that he could think of nothing when meeting Gandhi except the impropriety of the Mahatma's entering Buckingham Palace ''with bare knees.'' Brendon shows us the vainglorious Mussolini negotiating power with the Pope, and afterwards riding into Tripoli on a horse holding aloft ''the sword of Islam.'' As I read the book, I found myself sidling up to various members of my family and saying: ''Listen to this.'' But what do all these tales mean? Brendon doesn't offer much help. He is a storyteller, not an analyst. The author's line is the same as what we're taught in high school: The democracies couldn't handle the Depression. They were in no mood to fight while millions of World War I graves were still fresh--and they trusted that the feeling elsewhere was mutual. The world was looking for answers and for hope, and some of its most villainous men stepped forward to offer lethal substitutes. Shortly before becoming Chancellor, Hitler said: ''We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us--a world in flames.'' How right he was. It was a rotten decade to live in but a good one to read about. By STEPHEN BAKER _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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