The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm
The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm
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The Age of Extremes
1914-1991

Author: Eric Hobsbawm

Narrator: Hugh Kermode

Unabridged: 25 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/19/2020

Synopsis

Dividing the century into the Age of Catastrophe, 1914–1950, the Golden Age, 1950–1973, and the Landslide, 1973–1991, Hobsbawm marshals a vast array of data into a volume of unparalleled inclusiveness, vibrancy, and insight, a work that ranks with his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution.

In the short century between 1914 and 1991, the world has been convulsed by two global wars that swept away millions of lives and entire systems of government. Communism became a messianic faith and then collapsed ignominiously. Peasants became city dwellers, housewives became workers—and, increasingly leaders. Populations became literate even as new technologies threatened to make print obsolete. And the driving forces of history swung from Europe to its former colonies.

About Eric Hobsbawm

Born in 1917, Eric Hobsbawm was educated in Austria, Germany, and England. He was Emeritus Professor of history at Birbeck College, University of London, and Emeritus Universtiy Professor of politics and society at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of more than fourteen books, including The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire, The Age of Extremes, and The Jazz Scene. He died in 2012.

Reviews

Goodreads review by howl of minerva on March 14, 2015

So that rounds off Hobsbawm's tetralogy on the 19th and 20th centuries. 2000-odd pages of sustained historical brilliance that have changed the way I comprehend the world. In the absence of gods (and our inability to step outside of history to view it objectively) the nearest that we can come to a g......more

Goodreads review by Clif on September 18, 2013

History can be written in different ways. Barbara Tuchman, for example, chooses a theme (The Proud Tower) or a person (A Distant Mirror) around which to tell of the times. School textbooks simply follow a timeline, a guarantee not only of boredom but that the reader will learn next to nothing. Eric......more

Goodreads review by Callum on January 23, 2025

1914-1991: the Short Twentieth Century, an Age of Extremes. It was an "era of religious war, though the most militant and bloodthirsty of its religions were secular ideologies of the nineteenth-century vintage, such as socialism and nationalism, whose god-equivalents were either abstractions or poli......more

Goodreads review by Federico on October 04, 2015

Not a history book Hosbawm's "The Age Of Extremes..." is, best described as "A collection of Marxist Thesis on the 20th Century" than a history book. Perhaps an even better title is "A collection of Hosbawm's highly biased comment on a few 20th century historical facts". Over the course of its roughl......more

Goodreads review by Mesut on December 03, 2013

Usually the only people tackling long general histories are conservatives. The Marxists are too busy arguing over minutiae to lend their worldview to great spans of time. So Hobsbawm offers something that was definitely missing. Even though I knew most of the events of which he spoke, he offers sort......more

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