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Summary: The Age of Extremes, A twentieth -Century Life
Review: It is hard to believe that this book,"autobiography" is written by one of the gratest living historians.Not because of the awkward sentences but because of the obvious lack of depth. It consists of an endless parade of the names of his friends who are embodiment of intelect,dedication and idealism of Communism.The author himself so often unabashedly proclaims himself "intelectual",with all atributes of moral superiority.But what is the content of this moral superiority? What is the ideal of Communism? On these points the author is silent.
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Summary: A brilliant synthesis, worth four and a half stars.
Review: It would be hard to think of many historians who could attempt to write a work of this calibers. Yet Hobsbawn's schema of the Age of Catastrophe, the Golden Age and the Landslide has increasingly achieved canonical status. Naturally any work of this sort has some weaknesses. Here are some weaknesses: failure to give Indian democracy and Japanese society their full due, as well as a failure to explain the catastrophic failure of the African economy. There is a failure in the age of the landslide, to discuss China's economic boom. Hobsbawm refers to Spain as a "peripheral" part of Europe, a statement that reflects less a European viewpoint than an English one, and he tends to overstate the Keynesian consensus, which as books by Nelson Lichtenstein, Steve Fraser and Sanford Jacoby have pointed out, showed clear weaknesses in the United States as early as the forties. But then are the strengths: a brilliant chapter on the social revolution, dealing with the dissolution of the peasantry and the fate of working class consciousness. There is an excellent chapter on the cultural revolution. There is a fine chapter on the slow death of the avant-garde. There are Hobsbawm's own cameos through the book, such as taking a rather philistine attitude towards surrealists in the thirties, being surprised at how small Stalin's corpse was when on public view in the fifties, and listening to Oscar Lange's desperate deathbed plea on the fate of the Soviet experiment. ("If I had been in Russia in the 1920s, I would have been a Bukharinite gradualist. If I had advised on Soviet industrialization, I would have recommended a more flexible and limited set of targets, as indeed the able Russian planners did. And yet, as I think back, I ask myself, again and again: was there an alternative to the indiscriminate, brutal, basically unplanned rush forward of the first Five Year Plan? I wish I could say there was, but I cannot. I cannot find an answer.") There are two chapters which provide an excellent autopsy on the Soviet experiment, all the more intelligent when one considers that Hobsbawm belonged to the British Communist Party to the very end. And finally there is Hobsbawm's conclusion, where he points out that we cannot continue the titantic and radical changes of the past two centuries indefinitely. We face profound ecological and social crisis: "If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millenium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness."
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Summary: communist propaganda
Review: more left wing drivel...too bornig to even comment on further but from now on, I'm gong to read more on the books I intend to read. Does anyone really believe this stuff anymore after all that's happened? Please!
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Summary: Rewritting the Unwritten
Review: Not only has EH filled his book with precise data and good writting, but has developed the concept of the XX century yet to be found. Most surprising still, to found his ideas and concepts masked in serious political reviews and top politics writtings and essays. It will broaden your mind.
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Summary: Thank Goodness for Hobsbawm
Review: Should be standard reading in the 21st century This excellent, pragmatic and humanist analysis of our terrible century is by a man who is prepared to admit he was wrong, but has shows no mercy in hacking at the intellectual foibles of his contemporaries, both left and right. Compare it to the cruddy, polemical (and often erroneous) tripe peddled by Paul Johnson in "Modern Times". This is brilliance from one of the key historians of our age.
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Summary: Critical comments
Review: Sr Eric Hobsbawn: Me dirijo a Ud. en nombre de un grupo de personas, con las que comparto un círculo de lectura desde hace tres años. En estos años, hemos leído varias obras importantes sobre filosofía, historia y temas de actualidad. Acabamos de leer su libro "Siglo XX", lectura que nos proporcionó un gran placer, por su amplia y profunda visión de este corto siglo, que Ud, encuadra entre 1914 y 1991, casualmente un lapso de tiempo importante de nuestras vidas. Constituidos como grupo de lectura, somos sin embargo, un grupo de amigos, de muchos años, ex activistas del movimiento Judío progresista , con una edad promedio de 81 años. Por ambos motivos, nuestra edad y lo involucrados que estuvimos en los acontecimientos descriptos y analizados en su ensayo , nos consideramos testigos presenciales activos, del siglo que Ud. describe con maestría. Hemos disfrutado de su riguroso enfoque de los acontecimientos y su profundo análisis de este siglo tan tormentoso y cambiante . En los habituales debates que suceden a las lecturas, hemos señalado como rasgo distintivo de su trabajo, el órden y la suma de detalles a los que recurre para el análisis de los acontecimientos, sus causas y sus consecuencias . Sin embargo nos pareció que hubo una escasa mención sobre las causas económicas que influyeron en estos sucesos. Además nos llamó poderosamente la atención que pasara prácticamente por alto un acontecimiento tan importante y trágico como el HOLOCAUSTO. La sorpresa, excede el hecho que la mayoría de nosotros hayamos perdido nuestras familias en este criminal suceso , difícil de comparar históricamente, por su crueldad. En pleno siglo de imperio de la razón, se desata este genocidio ejercido por un Estado, involucrando a toda su estructura social, acompañando por la indiferencia cómplice de otros estados e instituciones religiosas. La cultura humana , tardará mucho tiempo en elaborar las profundas consecuencias de esta desquiciado retroceso al pasado criminal del cual emerge arduamente desde los comienzos de la historia. Paralelo proceso sufrirán los países, las instituciones y las personas involucradas . De esta convicción surge nuestra sorpresa ante la omisión del Holocausto ,como hito que subordina a la dimensión de su entidad tanto sus causas como sus consecuencias. Respetuosos de su obra, agradeceríamos nos ayude a entender su punto de vista al respecto. Nuestro e mail es dakot@cvtci.com.ar Abraham Kot
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Summary: Ask your grand-children
Review: The Age of Extremes, authored by the excelent historian Eric Hobsbawn and first published in 1994, is a good book to be read by anyone who will be born in 2100 onwards, but it is a lackluster and disappointing one for the contemporary middle-aged reader like myself, who almost knows by heart the facts, names and episodes narrated in the book. Maybe that was exactly the purpoted goal of the author, that is, to write the book as a factual and precise account of what happened in the XX century to generations to come, thus coronating a professional career of that most brilliant historian, but which, as a necessary counterpoise of his strategy, lessens the impact of its narrative to baby-boomers and Second World War survivors. The idea presented by Hobsbawn is that the XX century is a brief one, where one hundred equals 87, the exact number of years between 1914, when the century began, and 1991, where it ended. It had its formative moments in its first phase, called by him
as the "Age of Catastrophe", and which elapsed between 1914-1945, and was marked by two major global conflicts, that acted as a relay of powere to the Soviet Union and to the United States as the two contending global forces. Sure, a number of interesting facts considerations does appear, like the one where is stressed the almost paranoid preoccupation of Josef Stalin in preserving the Soviet Union as a solid state, bluffing almost all the times against foreign menace and at the same time eager not to have the United States accepting his threats as real ones. This bluff politics was latter to be magistrally also adopted by the show-man Nikita Kruschev, who "shoed-down" the United States in the United Nations General Assembly. The second period, called the Golden Age, and which spans 1946 trough 73, is the period where the capitalist system learned the lessons it had to learn from every part, inclusive from the communist practise of government controls, and reached the peak of its economic boom; that was also the period where the United States and the Soviet Union made the nuclear threat a major obstacle to anyone happines, especially in Europe, and where many proxy-wars were fought in the Third World. After this almost quarter of century of progress and expansion and paranoia, the impulse loses its momentum and the word, following Hobsbawn, immerses itself in gloom and lack of alternatives, due to the crumbling down of the Soviet Union into many nationalistic states, and where, also acording to him, the road ahead is not clear and necessary a good one for us survivors. If Mr.Hobsbawn, always a good reporter of the world he lived in, is right or not, the answer will be given by the children of your grand-grand-children. Make them a favor, buying the book, enclosing this message of mine, and answer, please to my grand-grand-children in the year 2.100. Me? I will be in heaven (I hope) watching out what is happening here in earth down below.
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Summary: Paul Johnson's "Modern Times" is better
Review: The book is worth reading but seems a little fragmented. i enjoy reading him as a historian along with his other three "Age" books (Revolution, Capital, Empire) but I do find Paul Johnson's book "Modern Times" to be superior in its style. Johnson is a journalist turned historian and can turn a sentence like few others can.
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Summary: An interesting, but undisciplined, piece of work
Review: This book is filled with facts, figures, and analysis of the century gone by. In that sense, it will please nearly any reader who loves world history. But Mr. Hobsbawm's book suffers from a number of flaws that detract from the quality of his work. First, the book is far too "Eurocentric." How any distinguished author can purport to write a definitive account of the century while mentioning the USA only in passing is beyond me. Japan, the Mideast, and Africa also make nothing more than cameo appearances. Second, by combining political events with socio-economic trends in a single book, Mr. Hobsbawm winds up with meager information on each subject. It would have been best to limit the field to simply politics and international relations. Finally, the tone of the book is too negative. The 1900s were much more than a collection of bloody wars and multinational companies exploiting poor people. Here the author's political ideology may have distorted his attitude. If Marxism is dead, then the future must be hopeless, right? I'll let the reader judge that attitude for himself. Overall, the book has some merits. The author is indeed very intelligent and his writing style flows nicely. I just expected more.
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Summary: Hobsbawm has lived through the 20th Century
Review: This book is for the non-academic. His audience is the average person interested in modern history. He eschews the footnotes and scholarly references.
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