Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century

by TonyJudt (Author)

Synopsis

As Tony Judt argues persuasively in Reappraisals, we have entered an age of forgetting. Today's world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and we have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how important they still are to us: now and to our hopes for the future. Judt 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 understanding the European past, to the rise and fall of the state in public affairs and the displacement of history by 'heritage'.Ranging with his trademark acuity and 'lan from Belgium to Israel, from the memory of Marxism to the practice of foreign policy, he takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it, and reveals how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we urgently need.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 464
Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd
Published: 01 May 2008

ISBN 10: 0434017418
ISBN 13: 9780434017416
Book Overview: A provocative, timely assessment of how 20th century world history was created, and what it means today, by the author of POSTWAR

Media Reviews
Exhilarating . . . brave and forthright. - The New York Times Book Review Perhaps the greatest single collection of thinking on the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural history of the past century. - Forbes By turns fascinating [and] edifying . . . Judt is one of our foremost historians of Europe, an elegant writer and subtle thinker. - Los Angeles Times
Author Bio
Tony Judt was educated at King's College, Cambridge and the A cole Normale Sup 'rieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and which he founded in 1995. The author or editor of twelve books. His most recent book, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, 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.