Publisher Description
The accelerating changes of the past generation have been accompanied by a similarly 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—and the results are proving calamitous.
In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with its geographical shifts of emphasis and influence, has altered structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. We have lost touch with a century of social thought and socially motivated activism. 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.
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“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 that no harm can halt the steady upward growth of its beloved free markets. Judt explains how the west awoke into the myth of its own greatness and believed, or perhaps it is better to say “believes”, in its own immortality. This behavior indicative of a young man seems so out of character for a nation of its age, a theme explicit in Judt’s criticism of the State of Israel, however once again Judt masterfully demonstrates how a sense of social community, characteristic of social democracies in Europe, became supplanted by the lure of the dollar and Euro. Judt also explores the fall of prominence of the public intellectual, as well as a series of character sketches that provide great detail to their condition and perspective.
In typical gusto and precision Judt navigates the uncharted waters of forgotten history, all to demonstrate how important the study of history is in the modern world. He cannot avoid favorite opponents, such as Maggie Thatcher, US Foreign Policy, Tony Blair and Israel, however his criticisms prove to be thought provoking and are hardly reactionary. This book is in some ways more impressive than Postwar, as it is comprised entirely of original material. Where Postwar meticulously references an array of important developments in as best of a non-biased manner that Judt can muster, Reappraisals pushes deeper into these topical developments to search for trends and indicators that of what world has been lost, for better or worse.”
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Michael (5 out of 5 stars)
