The Guardian Bookshop makes over 180,000 books available with up to 40% discount, as well as highlighting some of our favourite publications in each genre.
Find out more.
An assessment of how 20th century world history was created, and what it means today, from the author of "Postwar". By looking at a range of subjects, Judt reminds the reader of how important our own past is, and how it can change the future.
Synopsis
Draws connections between a range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust to the challenge of 'evil' in understanding the European past. This book shows how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory.
Book Details
Publisher:
VINTAGE
Publication Date:
05-Feb-2009
ISBN:
9780099532330
Guardian review
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
Ian Pindar the guardian Sat 21 February 2009
There's something remarkably prescient about this collection of pugnacious essays from 1994 to 2006. Not only does Tony Judt attack New Labour's worship of the private sector and "the irritating overconfidence of contemporary free-marketeers of the right", but he even directs us to read Keynes. Judt is spoiling for a fight most of the time, and many of these essays, most from the New York Review of Books, conclude with a note detailing the further insults they provoked in the letters pages. "We have forgotten how to think politically," he contends, and we live in an unpolitical "age of forgetting". Our immediate past remains incomprehensible to us, especially the powerful imaginative appeal of Marxism across Europe. He then predicts that a new Marxism, plus a renewed faith in the state, may yet make a comeback as the injustices of globalisation are exposed. He also mourns the passing of the 20th-century intellectual (Edward Said, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler) and "the strange death of liberal America" during the Bush administration.
