As Tony Judt argues persuasively in Reappraisals, we have entered an age
of forgetting. Today's world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty
years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could
make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the
results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear
prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of
international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social
activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and we have
forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting
and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt
resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how
important they still are to us- now and to our hopes for the future.Judt
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 understanding the European past, to the rise and fall of the
state in public affairs and the displacement of history by
'heritage'.Ranging with his trademark acuity and elan from Belgium to
Israel, from the memory of Marxism to the practice of foreign policy, he
takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it,
and reveals how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of
myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. His book is a road
map back to the historical sense we urgently need.