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Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Tony Judt

4.16 · Rating details · 1,004 ratings · 112 reviews

From one of our greatest historians and public intellectuals, reflections on a twentieth century that is turning into ancient history, when it's not being displaced by myth or forgotten entirely, with unprecedented speed and at great cost

The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a comparably accelerated amnesia. The twentieth century has be From one of our greatest historians and public intellectuals, reflections on a twentieth century that is turning into ancient history, when it's not being displaced by myth or forgotten entirely, with unprecedented speed and at great cost

The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a comparably accelerated amnesia. The twentieth century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it. In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with the geographical shifts of emphasis and influence it brings in its wake, has altered the structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. Quite literally, we don't know where we came from.

The results have proved calamitous thus far, with the prospect of far worse. We have lost touch with a century of social thought and socially motivated social activism. We no longer 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. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects the key aspects of the world we have lost in order to remind us how important they still are to us now and to our hopes for the future.

Reappraisals draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of "evil" in the understanding of the European past to the rise and fall of the "state" in public affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage." With his trademark acuity and Žlan, Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it and reveals how many aspects of our history have been sacrificed in the triumph of mythmaking over understanding, collective identity over truth, and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we so vitally need. ...more

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Jul 05, 2012 ·Karen· rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction

It's hard to know how to review this without merely stringing together a series of superlatives. So maybe I should do just that: trenchant, clear-sighted, stunning, dazzling, lucid, elegant, incisive, sharp. Indeed positively acerbic sometimes, especially on the subject of Tony Blair. Each country gets the politicians it deserves I fear.
The quality weekly German newspaper Die Zeit used to publish Judt's articles: in the most recent edition there was an interview with Mr Blair, who trotted out c ...more

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Aug 10, 2010 Szplug rated it really liked it

It's not often that I will read a collection of essays straight through from start to finish - but Reappraisals has that powerful combination of compelling readability and easy erudition that effortlessly pulls the reader along from one entry to the next. Judiciously assembled from book reviews and essays that were published between 1994 and 2006 - primarily in The New York Review of Books and The New Republic - the twenty-four pieces that make up Reappraisals loosely share a common theme: that ...more

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Jan 07, 2011 Tim Pendry rated it it was amazing

Shelves: five-star, history, modern-european, public-policy, twentieth-century, cultural-studies, north-american

I have long been an admirer of the recently deceased Tony Judt, an intellectually clear-sighted and courageous thinker who faced his own death with dignity and with the same integrity that he applied to his work.

I say thinker but he was more of an analyst and recorder, an historian whose political philosophy, a sort of revisionist social democracy, was probably out of time and out of place - but this should not be held against him.

This book is not much more than a collection of articles, alread ...more

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May 12, 2016 Justin Evans rated it liked it

Shelves: essays, history-etc

I admit, my ambivalence about this book might just be evidence of Judt fatigue, in the sense that I've read a bunch of his books over the last year or two, and that this is an unnecessarily long compendium of NYRB essays, and most importantly in the sense that I no longer learn anything new about Tony Judt by reading his essays. I know what he's going to say. I know that, about 75% of the time, he is absolutely spot on, and that he'll write well, and so on.

But all that reading has also led me t I admit, my ambivalence about this book might just be evidence of Judt fatigue, in the sense that I've read a bunch of his books over the last year or two, and that this is an unnecessarily long compendium of NYRB essays, and most importantly in the sense that I no longer learn anything new about Tony Judt by reading his essays. I know what he's going to say. I know that, about 75% of the time, he is absolutely spot on, and that he'll write well, and so on.

But all that reading has also led me to an odd place. I no longer care to hear Tony Judt slam, e.g., Hobsbawm for not speaking out against Soviet idiocy, not because there wasn't a whole bunch of Soviet idiocy, and not because Hobsbawm is blameless, but because Judt studiously ignores those leftist intellectuals who *did* slam Soviet idiocy (there are essays here on centrists who slammed it, and on conservatives who slammed it, and on leftists who didn't slam it, but not even a single essay on the French intellectuals who did, and France is Judt's specialty). Why? There's no good reason, unless he decided that writing about, e.g., Simone Weil would damage his own standing as objective anti-Soviet intellectual by associating him with the 'left'.

Meanwhile, at the other end of his professional activities, he goes to town on American intellectuals cravenly supporting Iraq, and doesn't mention leftists, because, as he puts it, he restricts his "discussion to intellectuals with significant public influence or readership, i.e., those who mattered." Now, Chomsky is not my favorite human being, but I would have thought he fit that description pretty well. Leftists do matter, and leftists objected to the war, just as many of them objected to the USSR.

This matters because Judt wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to be the great pro-anti-communist of the twentieth century, but doesn't want to trace the links between pro-anti-communism in the eighties and American bellicosity in the 2000s. He doesn't see, or doesn't want to see, that the social democracy he so brilliantly championed in this late work was undermined precisely because there was no alternative offered, and there was no alternative because anyone who suggested an alternative was immediately classified as a Socialist, and that was possible because people like Judt spent so much time arguing against fellow travelers (quite rightly) and no time arguing against neoliberalism, or arguing for alternative visions of leftism, which would have required him to distinguish consistently e.g., Soviet Communism, Communism, Marxism, socialism, and leftism. None of which he did.

That doesn't make him a bad person, but it does show the kind of thinker he was: stridently empiricist, hugely knowledgeable, but very limited when it comes to considering historical causation across periods; essentially anti-philosophical; and with horrific taste in literature.

Okay, that last one stands apart. But anyone who lists a bunch of mediocre anti-communist propaganda novelists and then calls them "the twentieth century world republic of letters" needs to be corrected. ...more

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Jun 03, 2016 Andrew added it

Shelves: essays

Profoundly, unapologetically intellectual historical essays by one of the smartest guys in the history game. It's a sign that I was writing down names of people he referenced constantly, and then adding their books to my reading list. From biographical sketches (solemn, equally critical and laudatory reflections on Kolakowski, Koestler, Said, and Camus, and unapologetic takedowns of Tony Blair, John Paul II, and Louis Althusser) to two excellent country analyses of Belgium and Romania, Tony Judt ...more

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Feb 14, 2010 Kelly rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, current-affairs-and-politics, 20th-century-postwar-to-late

This guy is awesome: http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/4073382... ...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Will Ansbacher rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, politics

It is hard to know what to write that doesn’t sound like a publisher’s blurb, because this is another brilliant and lucid book. Some have said that it’s a sequel to Postwar. It’s not, though, since it covers the same era as the last decade of Postwar, and in any case, the series of essays that make up the book cover ideas and a range of issues far beyond Europe and its history. Many of the essays are previously-published book reviews, and perhaps that is part of what makes Reappraisals so enjoya It is hard to know what to write that doesn’t sound like a publisher’s blurb, because this is another brilliant and lucid book. Some have said that it’s a sequel to Postwar. It’s not, though, since it covers the same era as the last decade of Postwar, and in any case, the series of essays that make up the book cover ideas and a range of issues far beyond Europe and its history. Many of the essays are previously-published book reviews, and perhaps that is part of what makes Reappraisals so enjoyable – it is also a book about books.

Tony Judt’s reviews, however, sometimes barely mention the reviewed book itself – he’ll present his own introduction first, and these really stand on their own, whether they’re biographies or commentaries on current events. Depending on whether he praised or shredded the book in question, it is always interesting to read the follow-up, because at the end of each piece, there is listed not just where it was originally published, but the resulting sparring between author, biographee (is that a word? I think not) and reviewer. NY Review of Books is where many appeared; now there’s another site where I could spend forever dipping into intelligent reviews. But I digress ...

It is not just Judt’s range that is so impressive; it’s the clarity, precision and honesty of his writing. He covers everything from the state of Israel (his one-state argument is so sane but will never come to pass, I fear) to biographies of Kissinger, Arendt and – the one that I bought the book for, I think – Primo Levi. I had not long ago read The Periodic Table and was deeply moved by it (though I still have not managed a GR review. The problem is, though, after reading Judt’s review of a biography of Levi, I’m not sure I could say anything meaningful except, lamely, “ ... what he said”.)

Reappraisals begins and ends with “The world we have lost” (the memory and lessons of the 20th century) and “The social question redivivus”. The book is worth reading for those two short commentaries alone, and it is certainly one I’ll read again.
...more

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Jun 08, 2008 hoffnarr rated it liked it

Shelves: history

Will be enjoyed most by those familiar with the intellectuals being discussed in the review essays offered in the first half. Also, those unfamiliar with the review essay style of the New York Review of Books may find the format unusual.

Judt can be a harsh critic, and sometimes simply unkind. While I'm no fan of the target, his essay on Althusser came across as just plain bitter and Judt just seemed to be pouring out his disdain for the post-Marxists around him.

However his amazing depth of know ...more

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Apr 12, 2017 Murtaza rated it really liked it

A collection of essays by Judt written over the years, many of which are book reviews that were published in the NYRB. Some of the best essays are reviews of books by Eric Hobsbawm and Hannah Arendt, as well as a eulogy written for Edward Said. Upon beginning to read, I found that many of the essays were familiar to me, as I had read them at some time in the past.

In general, I'm not a huge fan of collections of essays that vary widely in subject, inducing as they do a kind of intellectual whipl ...more

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Mar 29, 2013 Lyn Elliott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, history, politics

Tony Judt was a leading intellectual commentator on the history and politics of Europe in the later parts of the twentieth century and the first few years of the 21st before his early death. Judt's incisive analyses shocked those who preferred a quiet, comfortable tone from writers on contemporary politics. He combined a mighty knowledge of political and philosophical writings from the C19 and C20 with a piercingly clear eye for hypocrisy and for threats to what he described as liberal democracy ...more

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May 05, 2018 Lysergius rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

A superb collection of thought provoking essays in which Tony Judt looks back over issues arising from the events of the last century. He addresses each one in his characteristic style, clearly and carefully extracting the key issues and laying them bare for consideration. His topics range from Hannah Arendt and Arthur Koestler via Kissinger and Nixon, Tony Blair and the Cuban missile crisis. I would say in every essay he manages to cast more light on the facts, and explain hitherto unexplained ...more

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Jan 21, 2012 Mark Hebden rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy, history, favorite

This is a collection of articles and reviews by the recently deceased intellectual, Tony Judt, subtitled “reflections on the forgotten twentieth century”. It is as much about the scholarly response to events as it is about those events themselves, many of the pages for instance are taken up with book reviews for the New York Review of Books. Judt’s style wins through above the boundaries of analysis however and what comes across is a well thought through scrutinised account of some of the “great This is a collection of articles and reviews by the recently deceased intellectual, Tony Judt, subtitled “reflections on the forgotten twentieth century”. It is as much about the scholarly response to events as it is about those events themselves, many of the pages for instance are taken up with book reviews for the New York Review of Books. Judt’s style wins through above the boundaries of analysis however and what comes across is a well thought through scrutinised account of some of the “great” events of the past 60-70 years as well as a searing criticism of the academic writings attached to those events. The chapters are many and varied, usually around 20 pages long and thus crammed with information and critique. We learn of Koestler’s alienation from communism and his eventual descent in to pseudo-science which tarnished his reputation for many years. We understand how inextricably linked Primo Levi was to his Jewishness, much to his own indifference, similarly Manes Sperber. Hannah Arendt’s extreme linguistic polarisation regarding the “banality of evil” is picked up on, and her own confusion which renders her writings as best read in small chunks, as well as her lifelong discourse with the state of Israel. A chapter on Albert Camus betrays an authorial favouritism, rare for a professional writer such as Judt. This is tempered by the intense excoriation of Louis Althusser and his pick n’ mix Marxism. Eric Hobsbawm’s memoirs are dealt with tenderly but in a robust fashion which draws on some of the internation contradictions in the historian’s thought, though a heart-felt respect remains; perhaps for someone who has not altered their ideological course unlike for instance, Judt. Lezek Kolakowski’s work on the “main currents of Marxism” is loftily idealised and commended, mainly for understanding the flaws in the ideology as well as the benefits; many of which were never followed through on. The list of subjects covered is seemingly endless, Pope John Paul II’s conservativism, Edward Said’s “rootless cosmopolitanism”, an intellectual for whom the author holds the highest regard. The second half of the book moves on to more firm historical ground with the turn of “events, dear boy” but usually set against the backdrop of learned accounts. The military fall of France in World War II, Tony Blair’s disingenuous Third Way, an interesting account of a near none-state in Belgium. Romanian self deception and confusion appears briefly as do Tony Judt’s most controversial, and yet most prophetic articles on Israel. America, it’s foreign policy and the cold war take up a hefty chunk of the book, understandably given the domineering shadow of US hegemony throughout the latter half of the 20th century. The book finishes with an article published in 1995 concerning the social question regarding the European model of a welfare state vs third way sociology and right wing liberalism. This article is placed expertly to show how Judt’s own analysis of the situation was correct and how things are getting much, much worse from even that short time ago. A terrific book, and a good aside to his magnum opus, Postwar. ...more

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May 06, 2010 Michael rated it it was amazing

Reappraisals picks up exactly where Judt's Postwar leaves off, helping the reader navigate through the the mismemories and forgotten narratives of the postwar and Cold War era, all to easily forgotten in the tranquility of the 1990s West. This is to be expected as Reappraisals is, after all, a collection of previously published essays penned while the author was researching, compiling, and writing Postwar. Judt presents a West (and specifically an America) high on its successes and self-assured ...more

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Jan 03, 2013 Will rated it liked it

"Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap - and refills are free. Being largely without flavor, it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthe ...more

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May 09, 2020 N. N. rated it it was amazing

Shelves: european-history

[REDACTED]

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Nov 24, 2020 Brendan rated it really liked it

I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to Big History. I've been mainlining Big History for the last few months as I work my way through Fukuyama's epic "Political Order" series. Perhaps only gin has a similarly irresistible, intoxicating effect on me--the main reason that I rarely drink it. But I am powerless to resist Big History. I always go back for more.

So I turned to Tony Judt to temper the buzz. Judt was averse to Big History, even in his wonderful tome on late 20th century Europe, "P I have a confession to make: I'm addicted to Big History. I've been mainlining Big History for the last few months as I work my way through Fukuyama's epic "Political Order" series. Perhaps only gin has a similarly irresistible, intoxicating effect on me--the main reason that I rarely drink it. But I am powerless to resist Big History. I always go back for more.

So I turned to Tony Judt to temper the buzz. Judt was averse to Big History, even in his wonderful tome on late 20th century Europe, "Postwar," which I read several years ago and might revisit soon. In a monumental work of 900 pages, he consistently exemplifies a more mature form of historical reasoning whose narratives are small, cautious, and patiently constructed. Small History is the responsible adult, the careful collector who collates and analyzes facts and figures while carefully explaining the limits of its findings. Big History barges in and raids those curated cellars for the fuel that it uses to sustain itself. Where Small History is usually written by historians, like Judt, it is men (and they are almost always men) from other fields who plunder and pillage to create their grand narratives of historical direction and determinism.

Small History is a good tonic to my gin. Judt is a master of the form, picking at interesting threads in the historical record while resisting the calls of inevitability or predestination that make Big History so addicting. "Reappraisals" is composed of bite-sized analyses of various individuals, countries, and phenomena, mostly published in NYRB during the 90s and early 2000s. Judt convincingly cracks the pretensions of Communism, Anti-Communism, Neoliberalism, and many other -isms (forms or allies of Big History) without falling victim to the extremes of thought that sometimes plague lifelong contrarians.

Of course, he is not a perfect thinker. In these pages, Judt grinds his lifelong axe against mid-century French Leftists--sometimes to excess. Sartre, Beauvoir, and their compatriots had many problems; he accurately debits these flaws, but fails to credit the nuances that grant such thinkers continued relevance and resonance. Sometimes I suspect that his criticisms stem from a prototypical Anglo-American distaste for continental theorizing than more principled opposition.

At times, the essays are dated--they are strongest when grounded in history rather than then-contemporary events, many of which are no longer relevant. Incredibly, the 90s and 00s were a long time ago now...and how different were the concerns of that era! As I read Judt's jeremiads against Tony Blair or the Bush Administration, I couldn't help but reflect on the massive political battles of my teenage years--the War on Terror, most prominently--that are now mostly forgotten by political discourse.

Yet this American selective amnesia only supports Judt's most consistent point: the need to remember, and to remember *well* above all. The Iraq War, for example, has dropped out of popular discourse and some of its prime proponents (Frum, Kristol, etc.) have recast themselves as anti-Trumpist champions of Democracy and Reason. We should not forgive the warmongers or turn to them for wisdom, but the oblivion of memory into which the war has been cast will allow figures like these to launder their reputations and continue haunting our politics for the next decade.

Small History, then, is not just a preventive tonic against the big sweeping narratives that are fun but often wrong (or even harmful). Small History is the critical handmaiden in the task of remembering. "Postwar" was fantastic at this thankless work, showing, for example, how the European Union slowly formed out of various committees and commissions by accident and exigency rather than due to some Grand Plan of Wise Men. Those lessons may sound like trivialities, at times, but they are the actual Stuff that drives history. It is exciting and occasionally instructive to try and construct an overarching direction to human events--a telos towards which we stretch, a secret code that societies must obey (ala Hegel or Marx)--but that is all just an intoxicating fancy. History is so much messier, contingent, and difficult than is often taught or supposed, which is why it takes such careful and patient study to understand. Judt was one of the great guides of recent decades through the historical thicket of the 20th century. His presence is deeply missed in our age of perpetual forgetting. ...more

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Mar 06, 2017 Philipp rated it really liked it

Shelves: essays, non-fiction, great-britain

Great collection of essays, mostly from NYRB - mostly book reviews that serve as a starting points for broader reflection on history, politics, Israel, left politics, Western liberalism and where it's going to develop into. Some points are developed in more in-depth in Ill Fares the Land, lots of fun criticism of the current left:

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political en

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure, of course: We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, “race,” “gender,” or “sexual orientation,” and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but the sustained effort to transcend that identification in search of truth or the general interest.

The fact that most of these essays are around 15-20 years old lets you judge some of his predictions, and it's not always perfectly clear sighted, there's a sidenote somewhere that a 'moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow' - I haven't really seen that in the 15 years since this specific essay came out. Most of it painfully smart:

What we have failed to grasp is that, on the eve of the twenty-first century, the state itself is now an intermediary institution too. When the economy, and the forces and patterns of behavior that accompany it, are truly international, the only institution that can effectively interpose itself between those forces and the unprotected individual is the national state. Such states are all that can stand between their citizens and the unrestricted, unrepresentative, unlegitimated capacities of markets, insensitive and unresponsive supranational administrations, and unregulated processes over which individuals and communities have no control. The state is the largest unit in which, by habit and convention, men and women can feel they have a stake and which is, or can be made to appear, responsive to their interests and desires.

I'm thankful that these essays focus on books relatively forgotten now, making my to-read list swell up even more (1423 books! 17 years of reading) - Five Germanys I Have Known, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, and more now demand to be read, thank you.

If you read one essay of these, make it 'The Social Question Redivivus' (try a certain relatively new site by a certain Kazhak graduate student for access if you don't have it). This essay came out in 1997 and it's message has only become more urgent, with a recent rise of the far right which addresses exactly the problems Judt warned us about:

Why are we so sure that the far political Right is behind us for good—or indeed the far Left? The postwar social reforms in Europe were instituted in large measure as a barrier to the return of the sort of desperation and disaffection from which such extreme choices were thought to have arisen. The partial unraveling of those social reforms, for whatever reason, is not risk-free. As the great reformers of the nineteenth century well knew, the Social Question, if left unaddressed, does not just wither away. It goes instead in search of more radical answers.

...more

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Dec 16, 2020 Robin Mydlak rated it it was amazing

Masterful. Prescient. Instructive.

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Dec 23, 2010 Ushan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Tony Judt was a left-wing intellectual; one would expect such a person to have some interest in the lives of the proletarians, but the first part of this book consists of essays about other left-wing intellectuals, prewar, postwar and contemporary. Almost all of them are Jewish, though Edward Said too makes an appearance. I didn't know before that Said once said, "I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class or economic history." Why would he have said that if he ...more

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Oct 31, 2010 Harpal rated it it was amazing

This book is frankly stunning. Covering a range of topics from the role of intellectuals in 20th century Europe to the failings of communism, both practical and ideological, to the recent history of Romania, to the rise and fall of the welfare state, this book is a tour de force. Also, since it is a compilation of separate essays, mostly written for the NY Review of Books, it lends itself to dipping in for quick but intelligent reads on whatever topic fits your fancy at the time. Judt is a prodi ...more

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Jun 02, 2010 Rldsr12 rated it it was amazing

This book got such a great review in the NYT when it came out that I bought a copy for myself (and I rarely buy new books for myself!) It is as fantastic as it sounded. Tony Judt is one of our foremost historians and here he takes on the fact that we are a society that has forgotten how to debate ideas, we've forgotten our roots, we've forgotten how to engage in policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. He "shows how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph ...more

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May 13, 2010 Lazarus P Badpenny Esq rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, twentieth-century, ideas, the-proper-study-of-mankind, international_relations, 2011, vintage, global

Unusually, whilst one normally worries that collections of occasional pieces and book reviews may not stand as a whole outside the context of their original publication, Judt's short closing commentaries following his essays explaining their often fractious reaction made me wish that they'd been more contextualized by printing these letters alongside. As far as I'm concerned, academic infighting takes some beating and the prospect of a goaded Gaddis or a whinging Kissinger getting their comeuppa ...more

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Sep 06, 2009 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-history

Actually, I listened to this as a download from Audible. A bunch of short(ish) essays, excellent for listening to while driving or exercising, well read by an actor. This is a collection of writings or talks the author did, often for magazines. The part where the author writes about important 20th-century figures about whom you don't hear every day (Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kołakowski) was fascinating and makes you want to run out and read the works of the authors mentioned. ...more

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Jul 29, 2011 Nilesh rated it it was ok

The book is without a common thread and highly inconsistent. A collection of essays, or rather mostly book/author/subject reviews, where few are likely to be equally interested in all the vastly different topics. Still, some good sections - howsoever biased - on the situations in Belgium, Romania and Israel.

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Feb 28, 2009 Rick rated it did not like it

This book mostly dealt with the author complaining about other writers or intellectual individuals of the 20th century. 1st book in a long time that I didn't finish. It may have been OK for the right type of person, but I didn't care for it. ...more

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Nov 12, 2009 Neal rated it it was amazing

A forceful collection of essays on intellectuals, the middle east, europe, the cold war, and u.s. foreign policy. Judt is a gifted thinker and a wonderful writer. You'll think about the events of the past century - the forgotten twentieth century - in a new light. ...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Manray9 rated it liked it

A collection of essays by the late intellectual Tony Judt reprinted from NYRB, LRB, The New Republic and elsewhere. Thoughtful and erudite, if often outdated. The essays on Israel and its relationship to the U.S. are particularly apropos.

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May 07, 2018 Bluedisc rated it did not like it

Shelves: quit

I bought this book years ago because of Tony Judt's appearance on Charlie Rose's interview show on pbs. Tony was clever and articulate on the show.

I tried reading it then and I just gave up.

Well I came back to it to read it, and I now realize why I just gave up.

(Compliment-Criticism sandwich)
Tony is a great writer. He uses language well, has plenty of resources noted, and makes his points clearly and artfully. However my major complaint is that this is a book of old book reviews masquerading as ...more

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Jan 10, 2020 Dave Ream added it

New to this author, I wasn't sure what to expect, but I'd hoped for knowledgeable commentary that wove opinion together with description short of pedantry. I wouldn't know enough to evaluate his assertions and conclusions but perhaps I could tell enough from meaningful tieback from description to opinion and back to suggest a minimally-flawed credible treatment of European contemporary history which I thought was the subject. The subject turned out to be broader in geography but the author's wor ...more

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Oct 15, 2018 Piker7977 rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history, non-fiction, international-relations, world-war-i, world-war-ii, cold-war, economics, politics, philosophy, historiography-writing-process

This collection of essays and book reviews from Tony Judt illuminate the complexities and nuances of the twentieth century. Each chapter contains a subject or lesson that has been overlooked in mainstream academia and discourse. The anthology also gives the reader a large dose of Judt's arguments, perspectives, ideology, and biases which at times gets tiresome, but also serves as a reminder of the void that he and other intellectuals left posthumously. Their absence is derivative of the missing ...more

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About Tony Judt

Tony Judt

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Born in 1948, Tony Judt was raised in the East End of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis. Judt was educated at Emanuel School, before receiving a BA (1969) and PhD (1972) in history from the University of Cambridge.

Like many other Jewish parents living in postwar Europe, his mother and father were secular, Born in 1948, Tony Judt was raised in the East End of London by a mother whose parents had immigrated from Russia and a Belgian father who descended from a line of Lithuanian rabbis. Judt was educated at Emanuel School, before receiving a BA (1969) and PhD (1972) in history from the University of Cambridge.

Like many other Jewish parents living in postwar Europe, his mother and father were secular, but they sent him to Hebrew school and steeped him in the Yiddish culture of his grandparents, which Judt says he still thinks of wistfully. Urged on by his parents, Judt enthusiastically waded into the world of Israeli politics at age 15. He helped promote the migration of British Jews to Israel. In 1966, having won an exhibition to King's College Cambridge, he took a gap year and went to work on kibbutz Machanaim. When Nasser expelled UN troops from Sinai in 1967, and Israel mobilized for war, like many European Jews, he volunteered to replace kibbutz members who had been called up. During and in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, he worked as a driver and translator for the Israel Defense Forces.

But during the aftermath of the war, Judt's belief in the Zionist enterprise began to unravel. "I went with this idealistic fantasy of creating a socialist, communitarian country through work," Judt has said. The problem, he began to believe, was that this view was "remarkably unconscious of the people who had been kicked out of the country and were suffering in refugee camps to make this fantasy possible."

Career: King's College, Cambridge, England, fellow, 1972-78; University of California at Berkeley, assistant professor, 1978-80; St. Anne's College, Oxford University, Oxford, England, fellow, 1980-87; New York University, New York, NY, professor of history, 1987--, director of Remarque Institute, 1995--.

Awards: American Council of Learned Societies, fellow, 1980; British Academy Award for Research, 1984; Nuffield Foundation fellow, 1986; Guggenheim fellow, 1989; Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction finalist, 2006, for Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. ...more

Books by Tony Judt

When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

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“We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, 'race,' 'gender,' or 'sexual orientation,' and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but the sustained effort to transcend that identification in search of truth or the general interest. . . . In today's America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other diifference between them.” — 6 likes

“Lieux de memoire . . . 'exist because there are no longer any milieux de memoire, settings in which memory is a real part of everyday experience.' And what are lieux de memoire? [They] are . . . vestiges . . . the rituals of a ritual-less society.” — 6 likes

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