INTERESTING TIMES: A Twentieth-Century Life

"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)