Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

The New York Times

For the most active part of his life as an intellectual and a historian, Hobsbawm identified himself with the Soviet Union, which came into being in the same year he did. The failure and disgrace of this system are beyond argument today, and he doesn't any longer try to argue for it. In Interesting Times, he explains his allegiance in a pragmatic-loyalist manner, to the effect that many people were saved by Communism from becoming corpses, and that one was obliged to choose a side. This is utilitarianism, not Marxism, and he seems to recognize the fact by being appropriately laconic about it. It seemed to make sense at the time; he lost the historical wager and so did the party; history, he says, does not cry over spilled milk. — Christopher Hitchens

The Washington Post

Thus, an author whose most popular work is a four-volume history of the world since 1789 has produced a trove of international memories whose title quite accurately -- and sensibly -- puts his times before his life. Hobsbawm moves gracefully from portraying the slow democratization of Cambridge University in mid-century to describing the brilliant jazz scene in post-war New York City (when, as an avocation, he began writing essays about the music he adores) to lamenting the delusions of the French and Latin American lefts (his experience with the latter included a stint translating for Che Guevara). No fan of the counterculture of the 1960s, he can still appreciate its remarkable sway: "It may be argued that the really significant index of the history of the second half of the twentieth century is not ideology or student occupations, but the forward march of blue jeans." — Michael Kazin

Publishers Weekly

"The past is another country, but it has left its mark on those who once lived there," writes noted historian Hobsbawm in this lyrical, pungent and provocative memoir. Known for his histories of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hobsbawm examines this material from a far more intimate perspective and details his personal and intellectual life from his birth into a Jewish family in 1917 to the present. Weaving insightful material into a broader historical tapestry, he moves gracefully from his parents' troubled marriage to his early Communist political work in Berlin in 1933, and his family's flight to England with the rise of Hitler. At university, he became one of the "Cambridge Reds" and professionally was known as a "Marxist historian"-but, he comments, "historical understanding is what I am after, not agreement, approval or sympathy." In the forthright style that has made his scholarly work so accessible, Hobsbawm writes as easily about his love of jazz as about the complicated problems the Cambridge-based Historians' Group of the Communist Party had with the encroaching hard line of the Soviet government. While Hobsbawm's life is fascinating, it is his pungent observations on today's world that bring a sharp contemporary edge to his life and memoir. He has sharp things to say about Zionism, and of contemporary America he writes, "the US empire does not know what it wants or can do with its power.... It merely insists that those who are not with it are against it." This important work augments the life's work of one of the last century's most important historians. (Aug. 12) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

Autobiographies of academics tend to be unexciting, but this one is as brilliant and thought-provoking as Hobsbawm's scholarly works. His portraits of friends, his evocation of cities and countries, his commentary on social and cultural life, his reflections on his own career, his learned enthusiasm for jazz — all of this makes for fascinating reading. Hobsbawm has sharp insights on the youth rebellion of 1968, Thatcherism, Gorbachev, the United States, and himself. (He writes, "I have been ... someone who does not wholly belong to where he finds himself," and therefore he has avoided "emotional identification with some obvious or chosen group" — hence his dislike of "in-group history.") Especially vivid is his account of post-World War I, pre-Hitler Germany, where he lived as a boy. Few books so strikingly convey the atmosphere of turbulence and impending disaster that shaped the lives of inhabitants of, and refugees from, central Europe.

Most commentators, of course, focus on Hobsbawm's lifelong, unrepentant communism, despite his disappointment with communist regimes and the Communist Party. How could so intelligent a man uphold such an illusion? His answer is that he came to the ideology "as a Central European in the collapsing Weimar Republic ... when being a communist meant not simply fighting fascism but the world revolution." He "belonged to the generation tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope" for such a revolution. Today, at 85, he persists: "Social injustice still needs to be denounced and fought. The world will not get better of its own." Hobsbawm has arresting things to say and forces us to pay attention.

Library Journal

Any list of the half-dozen or so most respected 20th-century historians writing in English would surely include Hobsbawm's name. That for most of his life the octogenarian (b. 1917) belonged to a particularly orthodox Communist Party branch (British) of the poisoned Stalinist tree yet still commands such great admiration reflects his intellectual might and intrinsic integrity. Hobsbawm's sweeping series on 19th-century western Europe (The Age of Capital, The Age of Revolution, and The Age of Empire) is a standard international assignment even by instructors disinclined to hold any brief for socialism as salvation. Still, his autobiography, which sweeps from birth in Egypt to teaching at Cambridge, proves mostly a book for groupies of historians' private lives. Here readers will learn that Hobsbawm's avowed allegiance to Moscow was shaken even before the Khrushchev denunciations; that he constructs beautifully baroque, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sentences that reward rereading; and that his genuine modesty does not inhibit him from habitual name dropping, albeit of celebrities who made their mark in the limitedly appealing venue of public intellectualism. Recommended only for serious academic and research collections.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The noted British historian's tough-minded autobiography. Born in 1917, Hobsbawm grew up in Vienna as a child of the polyglot, multinational Jewish middle class. His parents were both dead by the time he was 14; he spent a few years in Berlin, where he began his 50-year engagement with communism, before moving to England with an aunt in 1933. His father had been an English citizen, and young Eric won a scholarship in 1935 to Cambridge, where he formally joined the CP. Hobsbawm doesn't write much here about his personal affairs, concentrating instead on lucid historical analysis of places and institutions with which he was associated and brief sketches of his comrades in political activism. A chapter on "Being Communist," in contrast to the passionate, often embittered memoirs of many American radicals, depicts the party in unsentimental, unglamorous terms, stressing the "discipline, business efficiency . . . and a sense of total identification" that inspired him and his fellows to serve an organization they understood was dedicated to armed revolution, not democratic procedures. This may explain why he did not leave the party after the revelations of Stalin's barbarism in 1956, though he took advantage of his position as one of England's most prominent Marxist historians to openly criticize it. Admirers of such groundbreaking books as Primitive Rebels and The Age of Revolution will be disappointed that Hobsbawm says little about his work as one of the generation of remarkable scholars who transformed the study of history by insisting on the importance of ordinary people's experiences, though there are brief character sketches of such peers as Fernand Braudel and E.P. Thompson. Neither ofhis two wives gets even that much space, and chapters on France, Spain, Italy, Latin America, and even the Wales community in which he vacationed for many years discuss their social and political structures more than his personal reactions to them. Not for readers seeking an emotional account of the inner life, but a bracingly frank look at the realities of being a 20th-century radical.