suffianr
19th November 2002, 16:33
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life
By Eric Hobsbawm
Penguin/Allen Lane, 2002
447 pages
I just read the review by Alexander Zaitchik on http://www.freezerbox.com
Very interesting indeed. Here's the first few paragraphs from the review:
He's British. He wears big ugly glasses. He is arguably the world's greatest living historian. He led one of the most cosmopolitan and intellectually vigorous lives of the last century. Between 1936 and 1986, he was also a card carrying member of the Communist Party.
Old Eric Hobsbawm doesn't take any shit about his politics, past or present. His autobiography is not a death-bed mea culpa. Nor is it a sheepish, seen-the-light paean to market economics. It is something much braver and more important than that. It's a ballsy illumination of what it meant to be on the left in the 20th century, what it felt like and why it mattered.
Born into a secular Jewish family the year of the Russian Revolution, Hobsbawm was raised and converted to Marxism in interwar Vienna. After witnessing and actively fighting the rise of Hitler, he emigrated to England, where he attended Cambridge and later established himself at the University of London as a world-renowned labor and economic historian. He has written books on jazz, gangsters, and the history of peasant revolts. Best known for his four-volume history of the modern world, at 85 he is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By any standard, he is a giant of letters. Learned with a capital "L".
Read the rest at Freezerbox.com.
Any thoughts? :)
By Eric Hobsbawm
Penguin/Allen Lane, 2002
447 pages
I just read the review by Alexander Zaitchik on http://www.freezerbox.com
Very interesting indeed. Here's the first few paragraphs from the review:
He's British. He wears big ugly glasses. He is arguably the world's greatest living historian. He led one of the most cosmopolitan and intellectually vigorous lives of the last century. Between 1936 and 1986, he was also a card carrying member of the Communist Party.
Old Eric Hobsbawm doesn't take any shit about his politics, past or present. His autobiography is not a death-bed mea culpa. Nor is it a sheepish, seen-the-light paean to market economics. It is something much braver and more important than that. It's a ballsy illumination of what it meant to be on the left in the 20th century, what it felt like and why it mattered.
Born into a secular Jewish family the year of the Russian Revolution, Hobsbawm was raised and converted to Marxism in interwar Vienna. After witnessing and actively fighting the rise of Hitler, he emigrated to England, where he attended Cambridge and later established himself at the University of London as a world-renowned labor and economic historian. He has written books on jazz, gangsters, and the history of peasant revolts. Best known for his four-volume history of the modern world, at 85 he is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By any standard, he is a giant of letters. Learned with a capital "L".
Read the rest at Freezerbox.com.
Any thoughts? :)