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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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