Book description
In Reappraisals award-winning historian Tony Judt argues that
we have entered an 'age of forgetting' where we have set aside our
immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We have lost
touch with generations of international policy debate, social thought
and public spirited social activism - and no longer even know how to
discuss such concepts - and have forgotten the role once played by
intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that
shaped their time.
Reappraisals is a masterful collection of essays, examinging
the tragedy of twentieth-century Europe by way of thought-provoking
pieces on Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Albert Camus and Henry
Kissinger, amongst others. It is a road map back to the historical
sense we urgently need and it is essential reading.
Tony Judt was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the Ã
cole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and taught at Cambridge, Oxford and
Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European
Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of
the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation
between Europe and America.
The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a
frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the
Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times
and many journals across Europe and the United States. Professor
Judt is the author of The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land,
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century and
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which was one of the
New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, the
winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award and
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in August 2010 at the age
of sixty-two.
