It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a
healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an
incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there
is more than one sort of luck. In 2008, historian Tony Judt learnt that he
was suffering from a disease that would eventually trap his extraordinary
mind in a declining and immobile body. At night, sleepless in his
motionless state, he revisited the past in an effort to keep himself sane,
and his dictated essays form a memoir unlike any you have read before. Each
one charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of
Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus
route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban
planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the
sexual politics of Europe, a series of roadtrips across America lead not
just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition
of citizenship. And everything is as simply and beautifully arranged as a
Swiss chalet - a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.