Book description
Two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will
return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call
the 20th Century. Their route is through their own minds and memories.
Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their
own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the
time was short.
This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the
kind of future we should strive for. Thinking the Twentieth
Century is about the life of the mind - and the mindful life.
Tony Judt was one of the great historians and public intellectuals
of his time. Educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the à cole
Normale Supérieure, Paris, he 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, and
The New York Times.
Timothy Snyder studied at Brown and Oxford, held fellowships in
Paris, Warsaw and Vienna and at Harvard, and is The Houslum Professor
of History at Yale University. He is the author of five award-winning
and critically-acclaimed books of European history; the most recent of
which, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, won the Leipzig
Prize for European Understanding, was named a book of the year by a
dozen publications and has beentranslated into twenty-five languages.
