num_pages: 226
description: 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 chaleta reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.
language: English
title: The Memory Chalet
publisher: Penguin Press