Thoughts on this book and on Hobsbawm in general? I would like to read pic related and the others 3 books, but first I want to know what is /lit/'s opinion on him.
>>7615475
Marxist, revisionist, apologetic hack
Marxist propagandist. He writes a supposed world history but vital shit like the Franco-Prussian War, the decline of China/rise of Japan and America's wars of expansion are barely mentioned.
>>7615579
too right
Read some of his stuff when studying identity and Nationalism, I think he's very reductionist, typical old school marxist
Are there any history books that don't suck? It seems like every single history book out there is a biased inaccurate piece of shit.
Hobsbawm is an interesting guy. He's been called, somewhat fairly, a Stalinist apologist for downplaying and "contextualising" certain things. If it's any indication, he was one of the founding figures of Past & Present, an extremely important historical journal still today, and of its founding members (all communists) I think he was the only one, or one of the only ones at least, who didn't repudiate his card-carrying status after 1956 / 1968. This was amid waves and waves of intellectuals and particularly historians repudiating their party allegiance, sort of defining moments of disillusionment for those generations. tldr: He is definitely a card-carrier.
His long ninteenth century trilogy is well-regarded by pretty much everybody. They are great survey textbooks. It's mostly his twentieth century stuff that is sometimes called revisionist or pinko sympathetic.
>>7615729
>Europe's Tragedy - Peter Wilson
>A People's Tragedy - Orlando Figes
>Anne Applebaum - Iron Curtain
>>7615729
I always try to use oxfordbibliographies.com, or the top source on a wikipedia article after i read its academic reviews. Here are some of my favorites:
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 - Alistair Horne
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Revised Edition, with a New Preface - Ross E. Dunn
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster - Svetlana Alexievich
To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance - Chris Leuchars
The Conquest of the Incas - John Hemming
Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny - Mike Dash
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann
Empires Of The Sea: The Final Battle For The Mediterranean, 1521-1580 - Roger Crowley
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution - Simon Schama
Keepers of the Keys of Heaven: A History of the Papacy - Roger Collins
Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe - Norman Davies
Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates - David Cordingly
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick
After the Ice: A Global Human History 20,000-5000 BC - Steven Mithen
The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land - Thomas Asbridge
The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia - Peter Hopkirk
India: A History - John Keay
The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings - Bart D. Ehrman
Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda - Roméo Dallaire
The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
Devil Take the Hindmost: a History of Financial Speculation - Edward Chancellor
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann
The Third Reich At War (The History of the Third Reich, #3) - Richard J. Evans
The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive & the Secret History of the KGB - Christopher M. Andrew
The Great Siege: Malta 1565 - Ernle Bradford
The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Africa's Most Controversial Leader - Ian Douglas Smith
Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty - Daron AcemoÄŸlu
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - Stephen Greenblatt
>>7615932
The Thirty Years War: Europe's Tragedy - Peter H. Wilson
The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire - Edward N. Luttwak
The Coming of the Third Reich (The History of the Third Reich, #1) - Richard J. Evans
Jerusalem: The Biography - Simon Sebag Montefiore
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 - Christopher Clark
Panzer Leader - Heinz Guderian
The Gnostic Gospels - Elaine Pagels
The Great Arab Conquests: How The Spread Of Islam Changed The World We Live In - Hugh Kennedy
The Great Heresies - Hilaire Belloc
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar - Simon Sebag Montefiore
The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (History of Imperial China) - Mark Edward Lewis
All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis - Bethany McLean
The Thirty Years War - C.V. Wedgwood
The Crime of the Congo - Arthur Conan Doyle
The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History - John M. Barry
>>7615763
If I keep in mind that he's a marxist and somewhat biased, are his works still worhty?
>>7616208
Yes. (Plus every historical study contains moral and so on values by the author, there's no 'objective' value-free historical writing.)
>>7616222
thank you.