"Ideas crackle" in this triumphant final book of Tony Judt, taking readers on "a wild ride through the ideological currents and shoals of 20th century thought.” ( Los Angeles Times ) One of our most brilliant historians, Tony Judt brings the past century vividly to life in this unprecedented and original history. Structured as a series of intimate conversations between Judt and his friend and fellow historian Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century presents the triumphs and the failures of the twentieth century's most prominent intellectuals and their ideas, guiding readers through the debates that defined our world. Spanning an era with unprecedented clarity and insight, Thinking the Twentieth Century is a tour de force: a masterful analysis of the life of the mind and an unforgettable guide to leading the mindful life.

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year Final reflections on a happy life-from acclaimed historian Tony Judt. Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any other. Each essay brings the smallest details of personal experience into the larger frame of history. Judt's youthful love of a London bus route becomes a reflection on public civility. Food and trains and smells all come alive as Judt takes us from the postwar London of his childhood through Paris, Prague, and points east to New York, where he found his home. Judt brings his moral clarity and wit to bear on everything from fast cars to radical politics and, finally, the devastating illness that took his life. This book, composed when Judt was paralyzed and unable physically to write, found its shape in the ordered rooms of a Swiss Chalet of the mind: a warm refuge in the closing darkness of his final years. Judt's book, Ill Fares the Land , republished in 2021 featuring a new preface by bestselling author of Between the World and Me and The Water Dancer , Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This book, first published in 1989, is the first general study of Communism in Mediterranean Europe during and immediately after the war. It explores controversial issues including Stalin's intentions in post-war diplomacy, Communist attitudes to Nazi collaboration in France, and the origins of the Cold War.

During the 1970s radical politics in France underwent major changes, transformed by the rise of the Socialist Party, the decline of the Communists, and the loss of faith in Marxism. These changes, together with the lessened impact of the industrial proletariat and the problems presented by Mitterrand's sweeping Socialist victory in 1981, signalled a veritable turning point in modern French history. This book offers a historical and political analysis of the history of labor, Socialism, and Communism in France since the Revolution, an analysis that is essential for understanding recent French political developments. Unlike most books, which treat labor, Socialist and Communist history separately and view French Marxism as a self-contained philosophical phenomenon, Marxism and the French Left offers a refreshingly different approach to the subject. Judt emphasizes the complex and interwoven themes that unify the topics of his essays to construct a distinctive and original interpretation of French left-wing politics over the past 150 years.