The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt
The Memory Chalet, Tony Judt
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The Memory Chalet

Author: Tony Judt

Narrator: Joe Barrett

Unabridged: 5 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/12/2021


Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay 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 divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation "was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution." A series of road trips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt's attention; but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet-a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.

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 Kelly

This has to be one of the sadder books I’ve read. It’s not quite on the level of Memories of my Melancholy Whores , which I couldn’t even bear to finish, or quite the terror that 1984 was, and doesn’t have the anguish of End of the Affair. It was sad in a different way. Tony Judt died last year of AL......more

The young woman was flabbergasted: the only form of discrimination she could imagine was sexual. It had never occurred to her that I might just be an elitist. Allow an extra 1.25 stars for the circumstances of its origin. This is series of light pieces, incipient memory exercise that Judt steadied hi......more

Goodreads review by Marc

"Post-war", the magnum opus of Judt was impressive. And also in this book he proves he was a very judicious historian and observer of his time. On top of that, what he had to go through, at the end of his life, struggling with ALS, was horrible. But progressive circles have made him into a cult figu......more