Not for readers seeking an emotional account of the inner life, but a bracingly frank look at the realities of being a...
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 of his 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.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-42234-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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