Book description
"It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good
fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age
of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must
shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey
to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at
some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must
suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head..." -Tony Judt
In 2008, historian Tony Judt learnt that he was suffering from a
disease that would eventually trap his extraordinary mind in a
declining and immobile body. At night, sleepless in his motionless
state, he revisited the past in an effort to keep himself sane, and
his dictated essays form a memoir unlike any you have read before.
Each one charts some experience or remembrance of the past through
the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a
particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public
civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student
riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe,
before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary generation,
but missed the revolution'. A series of roadtrips across America lead
not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual
acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all
compete for Judt's attention; but for us, he has forged his
reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and
beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet - a reassuring refuge deep in
the mountains of memory.
Tony Judt was educated at King's College, Cambridge and the à 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; in addition to Director of the
Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and
which he founded in 1995.
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 other journals in Europe and the US.
Professor Judt is the author of 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.
