Thinking the Twentieth Century
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th Century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the time was short.
This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for. Thinking the Twentieth Century is about the life of the mind - and the mindful life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this scintillating series of conversations undertaken as he was dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease, British-American historian Judt (The Memory Chalet) and his interlocutor Snyder (Bloodlands) survey the triumphs and barbarities of the past century through the lens of the thinkers and ideologues who shaped it. Interleaving autobiographical sketches with fluent, freewheeling discussions of history, politics, and culture, Judt revisits crucial 20th-century intellectual currents: the impact of two world wars and the Great Depression on politics and philosophy; the development of and rivalry between communist and fascist dogmas; the success of social democracy and Keynesian economics in bringing liberal government, broad-based growth, and social equality to the post-war world; and the retreat from those achievements prompted by free-market fundamentalism's attack on the activist state. (He also reprises his criticism of Israel after recalling summers on the kibbutz.) Judt's ability to distill heaps of erudition into lucid, pithy conversation, even when on a breathing apparatus, is astonishing; he's as engaging on the religious dimensions of Marxism and Freudianism as on Obama and the Iraq War. Snyder, a historian and former student of Judt's, contributes probing interjections that stimulate and test his mentor's ideas. The result is a lively, browsable, deeply satisfying meditation on recent history by a deservedly celebrated public intellectual.
