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• This is the kind of book that I delight in discovering -- one that exceeds all my expectations, that makes in a pleasure to slow down and digest the author's skill with words and his deeply personal and ruthlessly honest ruminations on his own past and the events he lived through, as well as the world he inhabits. The fact that when Tony Judt composed this memoir-like collection of essays (or "feuilletons", as he describes them) he was dying of ALS simply adds an element of poignancy. But the deceptively simple essays are a way of exploring important issues: important to him and important to the rest of us as human beings trying to find ways to coexist with each other and confront our own mortality in less dramatic ways than Judt was forced to do by his disease. Judt delicately backs into his subjects. Rather than writing about class relationships, he chooses to write about the institution of "bedders" (at Cambridge) or "scouts" (at Oxford), and his relationship with them and that of later generations of students with them; the ways in which those students prided themselves on being classless and yet by doing so, ended up violating something intangible that those college servants valued far more than social mobility -- being respected for who and what they were. He writes about his father and the latter's relationship with Citroen cars and it serves to explain his father's personality and his parents' dysfunctional relationship (I empathized, as the cracks in my own parents' marriage surfaced earliest and most often in long car trips) but also ends up as a commentary on the role of the car in our society. "The car, at the height of its hegemony, stood for individualism, liberty, privacy, separation and selfishness in their most socially dysfunctional forms... But it was quite fun at the time." He tackles austerity, gender relations, the delights of train travel -- all in the form of short ruminations that carry far more punch than their length might indicate. Indeed, one of the joys of this anthology is that it forced me to slow down my reading and really think hard about not only the words on the page, but about Judt's experiences, my own reactions to them and the deeper messages. In the same way that Judt's disease forced him to slow down and concentrate on the truly important things he wished to communicate, his readers get to slow down themselves and focus -- without having to confront the sheer hideousness of that disease. That is no small gift. Several of these essays stood out to me as being important distillations of what might be thought of as modern-day humanist thought. Judt writes of taking pride in experiencing Paris in '68, amidst the wave of revolutionary zeal. But looking back, he realizes what he was overlooking: the events in Poland and Prague, where students his age were trying to fight against true repression. His comment is typically pungent: "In our own eyes at least, we were a revolutionary generation. Pity we missed the revolution." Indeed, throughout this collection, Judt pulls no punches. "You are what your grandparents suffered," he opines, in connection with what he views as "para-academic" study programs. Political correctness is not his forte; thoughtful humanity most certainly is, however. I particularly enjoyed the extremely thoughtful essay "Edge People", in which Judt discusses the issue of identity, and the need to find a way to combine it with a sense of our common humanity. "Fierce unconditional loyalties... have come to terrify me," he writes. "The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity." These essays are gems, and I can see myself coming back to them time and again to re-read them even more slowly. I'm grateful that this book was a gift in hardcover, and so can be placed on a shelf where, when spotted, it can be pulled down in order to do just that, something that can be too difficult with a Kindle book. Still, I expect to end up buying this for my Kindle as well, because this is the rare kind of book that is so thoughtful and thought-provoking that I want to have a copy with me to dip into whenever I need to remind myself that it's possible to be a "public intellectual" without becoming pompous and self-important. How many public intellectuals have enough sense of humor about themselves to public ponder the reason their mid-life crisis led them to study Czech rather than buy a red Porsche? One of my favorite books of the year; this would earn six stars if that were possible, and is highly recommended, even to those who have found some of Judt's other works too politically opinionated (eg Ill Fares the Land. With Judt's death in August of this year, we lost that increasingly rara avis -- a clear thinker, with an ability to communicate his ideas in crisp prose, and a heart beneath the intellect.

  5.00 out of 5

  Chatterbox

• The Memory Chalet is a wonderful, elegiac series of essays by the late historian, Tony Judt. Crippled and dying from motor neurone disease, Judt composed these meditations in the dark nights as a prisoner to his own body. Part memoir, part disquisition and - inescably - part thanatopsis, there truly is something in here for just about everyone.Judt opens the book with his modest justification of using a memory "chalet" as opposed to the grander memory palace, and proceeds to describe the later part of his increasingly immobile life. The essays then wander off down the byways and alcoves of his life, encompassing everything from childhood, political evolution, life in other countries, and life in the ivory tower. This sounds like pretty standard stuff - and at times it is, though it's very good _quality_ stuff - but one of the real treasures of The Memory Chalet is how Judt uses his personal evolution as a lens with which to view Europe, America, capitalism, pedagogy and more. This is absolutely classic stuff, very much in the Montaigne model; and many attempt it, but very few other writers in these days of fatuous op-eds and middle-class narcissism achieve it with so much assurance and panache.Judt is simply a lovely writer. His prose, at once limpid yet lavish, is a treat. Unhurried and measured, you can almost hear his whisper in the night. It's intimate, yet not salacious; serious, but not pompous; and knowing, but not arch. Further, it's deployed in the service of some fantastic - albeit not revolutionary - thought. Judt's erudition is impossible to contain; it leaks through the text like oil in fish-and-chips wrapping, and it's just as delectable. Every reminiscence is garnished with a casual panopoly of historical data and fact. Judt cannot escape his role as an educator and even his most personal memory is tempered with a broader view of Western society. Omnipresent though, of course, is the looming spectre of death, and the creeping paralysis of Judt's disease. At times - no doubt married to his natural proclivities - it lends some of Judt's less substantiated opinions a somewhat curmudgeonly tone, at the expense of more complex realities. This is especially evident in regards to topics on education; Judt quite clearly regards himself as a last scion of that 19th and early 20th century creature, the man of letters. He is most definitely that, but in defending its existence and the model that produced it, he ignores or at least derides the conditions that make it less viable now. In short, Judt is a self-admitted elitist, and the prospect of more accessible universities and - perhaps - intellectual if not class mobility perturbs him.In some ways, I think Judt sees his illness writ large in Western culture. We in the west are paralysed: a lively mental and intellectual dialogue is unwilling or incapable of becoming political action. We are divorced from the realities and retreating ever further into inward reverie. Despite his averment, some of the starry-eyed young Marxist lives on in Judt. His disappointment - in the west, in his generation, in himself - retains a sting, and its provocations remind us that harsh realities underpin the most idle nostalgia. The Memory Chalet, much like its eponymous residence, is not the most ambitious series of essays. It is quiet, often comforting. Perhaps showing its age in parts and hardly revolutionary. But the very act of entering the chalet reminds us of the long, bitterly cold night outside. Confronted with so much, perhaps even endless, darkness, how is it possible to begrudge anyone some quiet reflection by an intellectual fireside?Judt, without doubt one of the towering intellects of the 21st century, has gifted us with a deeply personal, emotional, and enlightening book. It won't leave you breathless at its grand scope and social narrative like some of his other work, instead, it demands your respect and affection; to write something so human with so much courage. Vale, Tony Judt, this is a most fitting epigraph.

  4.50 out of 5

  patrickgarson

• Wonderful collection of essays, written and compiled during the last stages of the author's life in the knowledge that his time was limited

  4.50 out of 5

  jon1lambert

• I have never read any of Tony Judt's historical works, so I will take his reputation as a sign of his brilliance. I read this book based on the recommendation of Gregg Easterbrook. In his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column for ESPN, Easterbrook called it, "A work of pure awareness as life concludes, "The Memory Chalet" is a book God would read." I suppose after a review like that, any book is bound to be a disappointment and The Memory Chalet is no exception. I found the collection of reminiscences interesting enough and Judt certainly lived a full, varied and enviable life, but I didn't find a lot of profundity in the book.

  3.00 out of 5

  markfinl

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