“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. To fall prey to a motor neuron
disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing
more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked
head." -Tony Judt
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.”
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