When the Facts Change, Tony Judt
When the Facts Change, Tony Judt
List: $39.98 | Sale: $27.98
Club: $19.98

When the Facts Change
Essays, 1995-2010

Author: Tony Judt

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 14 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 02/01/2015

Categories: Nonfiction, History


Synopsis

In an age in which the lack of independent public intellectuals has often been sorely lamented, the historian Tony Judt played a rare and valuable role, bringing together history and current events, Europe and America, what was and what is with what should be. In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt’s widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last fifteen years of Judt’s life, the years in which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt’s concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11; and issues of social inclusion and social justice in an age of increasing inequality.
Judt was at once most at home and in a state of what he called internal exile from his native England, from Europe, and from America, and he finally settled in New York—between them all. He was a historian of the twentieth century acutely aware of the dangers of ethnic exceptionalism, and if he was shaped by anything, it was the Jewish past and his own secularism. His essays on Israel ignited a firestorm debate for their forthright criticisms of Israeli government polices relating to the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Those crucial pieces are published here in book form for the first time, including an essay, never previously published, called “What Is to Be Done?” These pieces are suffused with a deep compassion for the Israeli dilemma, a compassion that instilled in Judt a sense of responsibility to speak out and try to find a better path, away from what he saw as a road to ruin.

About Tony Judt

Tony Judt was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and the United States. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Superieure, Paris, and also taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Berkeley. Professor Judt was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the New York Times, and many journals across Europe and the United States. He is the author or editor of fifteen books, including Thinking the Twentieth Century, The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century, and Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which 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. He died in August 2010 at the age of sixty-two.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Marks54 on September 30, 2015

Every time I read his essays and book reviews, I mourn the loss of Tony Judt. This volume contains around 30 essays comprising book reviews, commemorative essays, and even some drafts of a proposed book about trains. They cover topics ranging from the Iraq War to the future of the welfare state to t......more

Goodreads review by Howard on February 26, 2018

I have read and admired Tony Judt for at least 20 years, largely in the pages of The New York Review of Books, where many of these essays were first published. They now appear in this superlative, sadly posthumous collection, edited and with a moving introduction by his wife, Jennifer Homans. (Judt......more

Goodreads review by John on December 23, 2014

This forthcoming, posthumous collection of essays from historian Tony Judt encapsulates his breath of knowledge, including European history and current affairs, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Iraq War, though he veers off track with his social democratic criticism of the Unite......more

Goodreads review by Justin on March 04, 2016

Could it be? A book that is precisely the sum of its parts, neither more nor less? Facts collects a bunch of book reviews and short essays, mostly written for the usual suspects (NYRB). Most of them are solid. A few are great. A few don't really bear re-reading. The most fun are the straight book re......more

Goodreads review by William on July 03, 2015

It took me a crashing long time to finish this book, not because it's hard to read, but because it consists of 29 essays, which would be highly punishing to read one after the other without pause. Tony Judt has raised my understanding of modern history (i.e. late 19th century forward) than any other......more