The Memory Chalet
Amazon Best Books of the Month, November 2010: In 2008 Tony Judt, the historian and essayist whose bookPostwarwas quickly recognized as one of the landmark works of our time, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. He was soon almost fully paralyzed, but before his death in the summer of 2010 he managed to produce not only two works of political and intellectual history,Ill Fares the Landand the upcomingThinking the Twentieth Century, but also a series of short essays that had a breathtaking reception when they appeared, a few at a time, in theNew York Review of Books. The pieces were remarkable both for their content and their method of composition: isolated at night in the prison of his paralysis, Judt would sort through his memories, arranging them, to better remember them, in the "rooms" of a Swiss chalet he recalled from an idyllic childhood visit, before dictating them in the morning to be published. The essays are at times political but always personal, calling up memories of food, youth, sex, education, train travel, and other subjects with a clarity and intensity born of both his historian's skills of observation and judgment and the heightened awareness of time's passage imposed by his undeniable mortality. Collected now inThe Memory Chalet, these reflections make up a memoir that evokes, with clear-eyed passion, the life of the mind, as well as the body.--Tom Nissley--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.