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Review
`Judt calls these charming vignettes "feuillotons" which, without being sentimental, gives them the elegiac quality of falling autumn leaves.' --Financial Times
Book Description
A collection of stirring, poignant personal essays from Tony Judt, one of our leading historians.
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80 of 80 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a wonderful book and reminds us, if we need any reminding, that we have lost, with Tony Judt's untimely death in August, perhaps the foremost historian of our troubled times.The Memory Chalet is a memoir that traces Judt's life from a secular Jewish childhood in South London to his last years as the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University. Each short chapter is arranged thematically and his descriptions of Putney, of solitary excursions to the countryside on the then publicly owned Green Line Buses, trolleybuses and British Rail as well as his other childhood and adolescent recollections of life in the 1950s and early 1960s tenderly evoke a Britain where there was still a sense of public purpose and community now largely replaced by a culture of individual selfishness and what Judt terms an "impoverished view of community - the `togetherness' of consumption". But what distinguishes this book is Judt's wit, humanity and wisdom. As he takes us through his education at Cambridge and the Ecole Normale Superieure and his life teaching in Oxford and later in America there are astute critiques of today's emphasis on utilitarian approaches to secondary and higher education whose justification is almost solely in terms of education's contribution to the economy and the level of salary of its beneficiaries. And there is an underlying anger in the book at the growth of inequality in Anglo-American society and of the servitude of politicians and commentators to neo-liberal capitalism and unregulated market orthodoxy.
Both The Memory Chalet and Judt's advocacy of a modernized social democratic politics,Ill fares the Land, published earlier this year, were composed while he was totally immobilized by the motor neuron disease that was to lead to his death within a few months of their publication. The books are a testament to his courage and a fitting memorial to a great historian and a wise and humane man.
Both The Memory Chalet and Judt's advocacy of a modernized social democratic politics,Ill fares the Land, published earlier this year, were composed while he was totally immobilized by the motor neuron disease that was to lead to his death within a few months of their publication. The books are a testament to his courage and a fitting memorial to a great historian and a wise and humane man.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A captivating little book of recollections, reminiscences, reflections and essays. They are delightful and warm, even uplifting, although the background for the book is sad: while dictating the stories, the author Tony Judt was dying from ALS, a motor neuron disease that in a short span of time killed his body, but left his mind intact. Reconstructing memories and delightful short stories was for him a way of enduring pain.
In an interview shortly before passing away, he says what we all know :`I was always good with words'; and he imagines his children reading the stories decades from now, and say: `This was our dad.'
I believe that the stories will continue to remind us of life's beauty. Perhaps Tony saw it more clearly knowing that there was so little time left. From my own childhood, I remember H C Andersen's little Match Girl, who in her last moments saw what escapes the rest of us: `No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen ...'
Readers of Tony Judt's other books, `Postwar' the best known of them, will recall an unparalleled master of the English language. That alone gives me much reading pleasure. It is a book you enjoy the second time as well. We are all able to recognize the themes in the stories; for Tony, early childhood in London, austerity, busses, school, trains, and Cambridge, but only Tony Judt can infuse the stories with humanity and keep us in stitches.
For some years, I have enjoyed Tony Judt's essays and reviews in New York Review of Books; and I will miss them, sorely. My favorite bookstore and coffee shop has New York Review of Books displayed, a new one each week. I couldn't wait to read the next one of his essays. (Some are now collected in a separate book, called Reappraisals.)
Born a few years after the war, a member of the baby boom generation, Tony Judt spent his formative years in Europe, and summers in kibbutzim in Israel, spoke the languages, was early on immersed in left wing political trends, and out of all of it, he formed his own ideas later in life. In his professional life he was a Professor. (This reviewer shares these experiences.)
In his career, Tony Judt was a professor at NYU, director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to the study of Europe, history and culture. By the way, Remarque is the author of "All Quiet at the Western Front. --- -- Review by Palle Jorgensen, Jan 2011.
In an interview shortly before passing away, he says what we all know :`I was always good with words'; and he imagines his children reading the stories decades from now, and say: `This was our dad.'
I believe that the stories will continue to remind us of life's beauty. Perhaps Tony saw it more clearly knowing that there was so little time left. From my own childhood, I remember H C Andersen's little Match Girl, who in her last moments saw what escapes the rest of us: `No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen ...'
Readers of Tony Judt's other books, `Postwar' the best known of them, will recall an unparalleled master of the English language. That alone gives me much reading pleasure. It is a book you enjoy the second time as well. We are all able to recognize the themes in the stories; for Tony, early childhood in London, austerity, busses, school, trains, and Cambridge, but only Tony Judt can infuse the stories with humanity and keep us in stitches.
For some years, I have enjoyed Tony Judt's essays and reviews in New York Review of Books; and I will miss them, sorely. My favorite bookstore and coffee shop has New York Review of Books displayed, a new one each week. I couldn't wait to read the next one of his essays. (Some are now collected in a separate book, called Reappraisals.)
Born a few years after the war, a member of the baby boom generation, Tony Judt spent his formative years in Europe, and summers in kibbutzim in Israel, spoke the languages, was early on immersed in left wing political trends, and out of all of it, he formed his own ideas later in life. In his professional life he was a Professor. (This reviewer shares these experiences.)
In his career, Tony Judt was a professor at NYU, director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to the study of Europe, history and culture. By the way, Remarque is the author of "All Quiet at the Western Front. --- -- Review by Palle Jorgensen, Jan 2011.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The author while writing the book completed in May 2010 was terminally ill afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) a neurogenerative disorder and died in August. The disease left him completely paralysed with intact only the clarity of his mind. He dictated the essays not with a view to publishing them but rather as an escape of the present through reconstructing memories of the past. The book comprise 25 essays and a time span of fifty years from his early childhood in the early fifties to his full maturity in the early 21st century. The book is at the same time the swan song work of Tony Judt and a minor classic.
The author, Historian Tony Judt, was educated at Cambridge and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University.
The fascination of the book to me emanated from a unique and gratifying combination of English pragmatism and continental intellectualism possibly reflecting his educational experience. His writing style is graceful, elegant, imbued with ethos and public morality, vivid, witty, succinct, and possesses strong presence, individuality, and originality.
In the book parade essays of childhood memories, houses and Swiss Chalets, Food, cars, bus lines, railways, schools and teachers, University experiences in England and France, his disillusionment from a foray into a Kibbutz,his encounter with the New World and with East European intellectuals.
Early in the book and the essay on 'Austerity' we are intimated with the poverty prevailing in the early years post World War II which was well tolerated by the population because they were equitably deprived and were privileged by the morality of the political leadeship. But I am tempted to cite the relevant passage in the book for the reader to appreciate what exactly the cover of the book means when it states that 'each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind.'
'Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition:it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the labour prime minister, from 1945 to 1951, had emerged - like Harry Truman - from the shadow of a charismatic leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.
Churchill mockingly described him as a modest man 'who has much to be modest about.' But it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history...he lived and died parsimoniously - reaping scant benefit from a lifetime public service. Attlee was an exemplary of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reforms:morally serious and a trifle austere. Who among our present leaders could make such a claim - or even understand it?
Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography:hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession:precise, restrained - and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Savador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing - and cupidity - of Damien Hirst.'
I could cite very many gem like passages like the above but there are space constraints in a review, additionally I do not wish to deprive the prospective reader the originality of the experience.
The author, Historian Tony Judt, was educated at Cambridge and Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University.
The fascination of the book to me emanated from a unique and gratifying combination of English pragmatism and continental intellectualism possibly reflecting his educational experience. His writing style is graceful, elegant, imbued with ethos and public morality, vivid, witty, succinct, and possesses strong presence, individuality, and originality.
In the book parade essays of childhood memories, houses and Swiss Chalets, Food, cars, bus lines, railways, schools and teachers, University experiences in England and France, his disillusionment from a foray into a Kibbutz,his encounter with the New World and with East European intellectuals.
Early in the book and the essay on 'Austerity' we are intimated with the poverty prevailing in the early years post World War II which was well tolerated by the population because they were equitably deprived and were privileged by the morality of the political leadeship. But I am tempted to cite the relevant passage in the book for the reader to appreciate what exactly the cover of the book means when it states that 'each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind.'
'Looking back from our present vantage point, one sees more clearly the virtues of that bare-bones age. No one would welcome its return. But austerity was not just an economic condition:it aspired to a public ethic. Clement Attlee, the labour prime minister, from 1945 to 1951, had emerged - like Harry Truman - from the shadow of a charismatic leader and embodied the reduced expectations of the age.
Churchill mockingly described him as a modest man 'who has much to be modest about.' But it was Attlee who presided over the greatest age of reform in modern British history...he lived and died parsimoniously - reaping scant benefit from a lifetime public service. Attlee was an exemplary of the great age of middle-class Edwardian reforms:morally serious and a trifle austere. Who among our present leaders could make such a claim - or even understand it?
Moral seriousness in public life is like pornography:hard to define but you know it when you see it. It describes a coherence of intention and action, an ethic of political responsibility. All politics is the art of the possible. But art too has its ethic. If politicians were painters, with FDR as Titian and Churchill as Rubens, then Attlee would be the Vermeer of the profession:precise, restrained - and long undervalued. Bill Clinton might aspire to the heights of Savador Dali (and believe himself complimented by the comparison), Tony Blair to the standing - and cupidity - of Damien Hirst.'
I could cite very many gem like passages like the above but there are space constraints in a review, additionally I do not wish to deprive the prospective reader the originality of the experience.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Memory Chalet
Great book! I enjoyed it very much and bought four more for my friends. For my daughter I got in two languages. Fully recommended!
Published 3 months ago by S. Sajin
A HOMAGE TO MEMORY
It turns out that I had a lot in common with Tony Judt. Born in 1948; grammar school education, followed by Oxbridge in 1966; mid-life crisis; life-long interest in history; but... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Stephen Cooper
A masterpiece
One cannot dissociate this small masterpiece from the very particular process by which it has been created: the author alone in his bed, paralysed by his illness but with a lively... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Joost Strickx
A brief review
There are very few books which I have read straight through twice without tackling something else in the interim. This is one of them. Read more
Published 10 months ago by John Mccartney
A lesson in wisdom and courage
Tony Judt , the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University, and Director of NYU's Erich Maria Remarque Institute ,the controversial essayist, passed... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Draz Mohammad Waguih
Ways of looking back
Two references in reviews -the assertion of post-war prosperity, and the suggestion of "Proustian" associations of memory- prompted me to buy this book, which I immediately... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Robert Allsop
do buy this book!
It is not easy to compile a book of short essays which maintain a high level of quality and authority throughout. Read more
Published 15 months ago by C. W. Robbins
The Memory Chalet
This book is just so good.
It's well written, and you want to read it very slowly, so that you don't miss anything. Read more
It's well written, and you want to read it very slowly, so that you don't miss anything. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Inger Bach Hansen
Farewell from a great historian.
Tony Judt's reputation will rest on his earlier, fuller work, particularly "Postwar" and perhaps his later "Ill Fares the Land". Read more
Published 16 months ago by hugnor
Memories trapped in a man's body...
Tony Judt, a British born and educated historian, died in August, 2010, at the age of 62 of ALS. In his final months, he wrote - with the aid of transcribers - a series of essays... Read more
Published 16 months ago by Jill Meyer
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