Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781595589774)

Eric Hobsbawm, who passed away in 2012, was one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age. Through his work, he observed the great twentieth-century confrontation between bourgeois fin de si cle culture and myriad new movements and ideologies, from communism and extreme nationalism to Dadaism to the emergence of information technology. In Fractured Times, Hobsbawm, with characteristic verve, unpacks a century of cultural fragmentation.

Hobsbawm examines the conditions that both created the flowering of the belle poque and held the seeds of its disintegration: paternalistic capitalism, globalization, and the arrival of a mass consumer society. Passionate but never sentimental, he ranges freely across subjects as diverse as classical music, the fine arts, rock music, and sculpture. He records the passing of the golden age of the "free intellectual" and explores the lives of forgotten greats; analyzes the relationship between art and totalitarianism; and dissects phenomena as diverse as surrealism, art nouveau, the emancipation of women, and the myth of the American cowboy.

Written with consummate imagination and skill, Fractured Times is the last book from one of our greatest modern-day thinkers.

Author: Eric Hobsbawm
ISBN-10: 1595589775
ISBN-13: 9781595589774
Publisher: New Press
Language: English
Published: 05/06/2014
Pages: 336
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.40w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/13/2014
Booklist 03/15/2014 pg. 45
Kirkus Reviews 03/15/2014
New York Times Book Review 09/07/2014 pg. 22