Eric Hobsbawm was born the year of the October Revolution. He was 15 years old when he returned home from school in Berlin and saw in the newspaper headlines that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. And he was in New York with his students when the Soviet Union collapsed. He translated for Che Guevara in Havana, had dinner with a Soviet spy during Christmas in Budapest, and spent an afternoon at Mahalia Jackson's house in Chicago. He saw Stalin's body, and while others remember where they were when President Kennedy died, he remembers where he was when President Allende was assassinated. Five years later, along with Tensa Allende and other comrades and friends, he watched on television in Santiago the wonderful moment when the legal department of the House of Lords announced the historic verdict against former Chilean dictator General Pinochet.
Multilingual, wanderer, always curious, and almost contemporary with the most dramatic century in human history, which is the subject of his most widely read book, "The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991", with his eyes and ears wide open, he devoted himself exclusively to understanding the fascinating years in which he lived. His autobiography is the assessment of a passionately cosmopolitan Jew from the journeys he made in the past, which is like another country from the one that became the world of 2002.
Hobsbawm takes us from England to the countries and cultures of Europe, to America (which he first appreciated through jazz), to Latin America, Chile, India, and the Far East, as well as to the countries of "real socialism" before and after their collapse. He guides us through the turbulent seas of the 20th century and the ideological as well as military battles that took place during it, through the vigilant eye of an observer who actively participated in the events of his time.