The Dark Valley

I used my own shopping list and got "The Dark Valley" through in the mail today. Looks incredible. From the introduction:

"Many people during the 1930s remarked that they were passing through a dark valley, the valley of the shadow of death, a vale of tears in which forces of darkness threatened to overwhelm the angels of light. The image is biblical (rather than Freudian) but darkenss was no mere image: it literally covered the earth during the Depression, If the lamps went out in 1914, if the blinds came down in 1939, the lights were progressively dimmed after 1929.... [...] So my pupose is clear, if ambitious. It is to shed new light on a dark, dishonest decade. It is to cast a broad beam of illumination into a gloomy period, a period when the world was struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another, the greatest in history."