I started to actually get upset when I realized that I was nearing the end (after all, histories can't go past the present).

This book is amazingly comprehensive and focuses on the "myths" of Europe as much as it does the history. It's case seems to be made out of what people claim about Europe, offering ways to think about history as a kinetic movement that is constantly wrestling with itself. As he quotes in the last chapter: "The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things." - Ernest Renan. The "nation" itself is a portal for infinite scrutiny for Judt, as he unpacks Soviet colonism of Eastern Europe, divided nationalities, Nationalism in all it's forms, the European Union's role in challenging national identity, sub-national conflicts within states, as just some of the avenues of thought. Perhaps what affected me most was his early observation that postwar Europe's legacy is one of ethnic cleansing, in that nations were born out of the mass movement and murder of people. This is not just in regards to the Holocaust, but also in the codification of European states into fixed ethno-linguistic countries that finally retire in the last few decades into nostalgic old men and women, who go about making monuments to the nations they feel that they had lost. But even then, the idea of the "nation" has already been pulled out from under them.