The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 1 April 2013
by Tony Judt
Tony Judt was a well known and largely well-respected historian of postwar Europe. At too young of an age, he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of Lou Gehrig's disease, which progressively trapped him within a disfunctional body. Despite this death sentence, Judt went on to finish large works of history and a number of essays, many of which appeared in the New York Review of Books. Compiled here, some of these essays function as a kind of memoir, a study in the endurance of memory and the shelter it offers, imperfect as it is. Judt is an unsentimental student of his own life. In fact, the phrase that comes to mind is the oxymoronic "unsentimental nostalgia". Judt writes of his youth in London, extending a memory of a favorite bus route to commentary on modern development patterns. He writes of the austerity of the post-war years, and our modern understanding of what it means to be without. He writes of his experience of America, where he settled later in life. He writes of his college years and fervent Zionism. And he writes of his movement away from youthful political passions that he doesn't see so much as naive as just a step in his understanding. He writes of love, education and his career. He doesn't write of loss, though that loss is inherently implied by what we know of his creeping illness (and his death at an all-too-young age). The author rigorously questions the assumptions of his generation, its received wisdom, and political correctness. This, of course, sometimes made him unpopular. But, his writing is analytical, rigorous and honest. His opinions are strong and well founded, even if the reader may find points of disagreement. He writes as all authors should, without fear.