Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century by Tony Judt, James Adams (Read by)

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(Audio - Unabridged, 11 cassettes, 14 hrs. 30 min)

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  • Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
  • Pub. Date: May 2008
  • ISBN-13: 9781433213779
  • Sales Rank: 543,420
  • 11pp
  • Edition Description: Unabridged, 11 cassettes, 14 hrs. 30 min
 
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Synopsis

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" inpublic affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage." With his trademark acuity and élan, 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.

The New York Times - Geoffrey Wheatcroft

…[an] exhilarating new collection of essays…Few are better than Tony Judt, not only a historian of the first rank but (in a word we need an equivalent for) a politicologue who gives engagement a good name.

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Biography

Tony Judt was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the ƒcole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and that he founded in 1995. The author or editor of twelve books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other journals in Europe and the United States. Professor Judt is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Permanent Fellow of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna). 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.

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Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Centuryby Anonymous

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April 17, 2008: Judt is a person of great, knowledge and learning. He has a rare capacity to read History and its events from a number of different perspectives. Yet he is also a person who deliberately skews and slants his knowledge in service of his own prejudices. So the rereading he makes in this book of twentieth century history and its lessons for the future. Here his major lesson is the central importance of the terrible destructiveness of war, and therefore the necessity of its avoidance. This message on the surface certainly makes sense. But does it make sense when it comes to responding to the Japanese attack on the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor? Did it make sense in the Soviet Union's response in resisting the Reich's invasion of late June 1940? Does it make sense now for Judt to recommend a kind of pacifism in response to what he sees as a relatively harmless, scattered Islamic terror threat? Judt sees much but he deliberately scants much else. In his dismissal of the concept of Islamofascism he points to the less than state power of so many of the groups involved. But why does he deliberately omit discussing the major 'contractor' Iran ? And why does he ignore the role of Saudi Arabia in funding the propaganda war aimed at spreading Islam throughout the West? Judt writes that the world today looks back on the twentieth century from narrow, partisan, ethnic perspective. He laments the broader picture which for instance Europeans had after the French Revolution, the Enlightentment that preceeded it. He even believes that the West did have a certain perspective on its nineteenth century history understanding turning point events. He argues that a larger picture and larger lessons from the twentieth century have not emerged. He especically criticizes Americans saying that the absence of massive civilian American casualties means that the country unlike the Europeans does not really understand what War is. He argues thus that European reluctance to War is in fact a sign of their mature knoweldge and understanding. They got it , and America did not. One wonders how they would have gotten it had the United States not rescued Europe in the Second War. One wonders too how the Europeans will get it in the future should the growing Islamic power within and without undermine the traditional bases of their societies. Judt above all seems to imply that 'Peace' can be imposed by one side upon another. He does not seem to want to recognize the reality that their are violently, aggressive, expansionist forces which can be answered only by physical resistance. His mocking of the clash of civilizations, his underplaying of what some have called Global Jihad marks a major shortcoming of the work. How unfortunate that a person of Judt's tremendous learning should see so much and yet miss what is most essential.