Interesting Times

"Eric Hobsbawm is considered by many to be our greatest living historian. Robert Heilbroner, writing about Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, 1914-1991, said, "I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures." Skeptical, endlessly curious, and almost contemporary with the terrible "short century" that is the subject of The Age of Extremes, his most widely read book, Hobsbawm has, for eighty-five years, been committed to understanding the "interesting times" through which he has lived." "Hitler came to power as Hobsbawm was on his way home from school in Berlin, and the Soviet Union fell while he was giving a seminar in New York. He was a member of the Apostles at King's College, Cambridge, took E.M. Forster to hear Lenny Bruce, and demonstrated with Bertrand Russell against nuclear arms in Trafalgar Square. He translated for Che Guevara in Havana, had Christmas dinner with a Soviet master spy in Budapest, and spent an evening at home with Mahalia Jackson in Chicago. He saw the body of Stalin, started the modern history of banditry, and is probably the only Marxist ever asked to collaborate with the inventor of the Mars bar." "Hobsbawn takes us from Britain to the countries and cultures of Europe, to America (which he appreciated first through movies and jazz), to Latin America, Chile, India, and the Far East. With Interesting Times, we see the history of the twentieth century through the unforgiving eye of one of its most intensely engaged participants, the incisiveness of whose views we cannot afford to ignore in a world in which history has come to be increasingly forgotten."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.