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 enlarge | Author: Tony Judt
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.09
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Avg. Customer Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 167398
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 1594201366
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.82
EAN: 9781594201363
ASIN: 1594201366
Publication Date: April 17, 2008
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| Showing reviews 6-9 of 9 | | « PREV | | |
 Try before you buy! May 15, 2008
1 out of 15 found this review helpful
I've read Judt's "Postwar" and found it to be a book I enjoy returning to. I thus picked this one up eagerly whilst browsing at the bookstore...and, after flitting through the final few essays, checked the jacket to double-check that the thing hadn't been authored by the Reverend Runt of "Barry Lyndon", so pious and smarmy was the tone. I'll simply say: The reason for the denial is the need for it. The denial of what? Judt's putative denial of the truth of the old saw about fascism always seeming to be descending on America, but landing on Europe.
A good book spoiled by an extraneous obsession May 14, 2008
6 out of 21 found this review helpful
I bought this book because I noted that the first chapter is about Arthur Koestler who was a hero for me when I was a young man. Indeed what Judt writes about him is eloquent and insightful. Many of the other chapters such as the one about Hannah Arendt are also interesting and well worth reading, so overall I'm glad that I bought the book and can recommend it to others. Just be sure to read the table of contents before you buy, because the subject matter may not be interesting or even comprehensible to everyone; it depends very much on your age and background.
That's the good news, now for what spoils the book in my opinion. As I happily read on I finally came to a chapter about Edward Said and I thought - what is he doing here? Whatever his merits might be, he does not belong in this company. He lived later than the other people and he can hardly be described as belonging to the forgotten twentieth century. So then I did some googling and found out what most other readers probably knew all along about Tony Judt. That sometime in his adult life he lost his early enthusiasm for Zionism and decided to become a supporter of the Palestinians. This of course lead to difficulties in his career and his life which in turn lead to bitterness until his new geopolitical ideas became an obession and started to dominate his view of the world. Now of course Tony Judt has a right to his opinions and the fact that I do not agree with him is not the point. The point is that he should not have allowed his obsessions with the Israeli-Arab conflict to enter into a book where they do not belong. The only result of that has been to confuse and irritate his readers, as the previous reviews make very clear.
Well I don't want to beat a dead horse here so let me end by quoting from page 390 what is Tony Judt's definition of Israel:
"A country that for fifty years has rested ite entire national strategy upon preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redraw rhe map of the whole Middle East."
Again, the fact that this condemnation is ahistorical and grossly unfair is not the point. The point is that it does not belong in this book. My advice to Tony Judt is that he should consider writing a book about the Middle East alone, a book in which he could allow his anti-Israel obsessions free reign. Such a book may not attract many readers, but it will surely make him feel better.
Interesting and obsessed with two topics May 1, 2008
13 out of 33 found this review helpful
This is a fascinating book and will enlighten and offer much to many readers Judt critiques and skewers intellectuals including Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics)) and Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon: A Novel. He heaps praise on Edward Said (Orientalism). He examines the nature of leftist apologetics for Communist atrocities and he examines such controversial histories and France's relationship to the Fall of France in 1940. The writing is erudite and high minded. But the book suffers from a tragic obsession: Israel and Judaism. It leaves the reader wondering if Judt's book should have been titled 'my views on Israel and Jewish intellectuals in European history'. These are not reflections on a 'forgotten' 21st century. Judt reminds us that of things that everyone already knows about. His analysis of the 1967 Six Day War and how it changed Israel is not unique. His virulent hatred and condemnation of Israel and its existence as a 'western' 'colonial' 'European' country, which it is not, is neither original or unique. There is nothing forgotten here. This is where the book falls apart, Judt's obsessive anger at Israel and his obsession with its not living up to his standards. He opens one chapter by complaining that while Europe has 'grown up', Israel has remained 'immature'. But how is that exactly? Europe has 'grown up' in the last 60 years in the shadow of its greatest crimes, the Holocaust. It is had grown up under a blood dimmed sky. Israel should be happy and proud not to have 'grown up' the way Europe has. Mr. Judt does not dare skewer his own continent for its mistakes, for its racism, its colonialism, its fascism, its immigration crises, its rampant poverty and arrogance. Unless a brilliant writer like Judt, an intellectual critiquer can come to grips with himself and his continent he should not have tried to bite off such a big chunk such as the 20th century.
Seth J. Frantzman
A reappraisal should be made of the reappraisal April 17, 2008
23 out of 80 found this review helpful
Judt has a rare capacity to read History and its events from a number of different perspectives. His knowledge ranges over very wide areas. His expertise is first and above all in modern European history. But he also writes often about intellectual history, about the situation in the Middle East, and about the general situation of liberalism and socialism. In this wide- ranging group of essays he reappraises many of the most significant intellectuals of the past century, from Arthur Koestler to Hannah Arendt, from Manes Sperber to Eric Hobshawm. He too makes an overall assessment of European History in this century and the lessons which can be drawn from it.
My own focus in this review is on his essay reappraising American and European attitudes towards War.
Here we meet Judt at his most injudicious, skewing and slanting his knowledge in service of his own prejudices. So the rereading he makes in this book of twentieth century history and its lessons for the future. Here his major lesson is the central importance of the terrible destructiveness of war, and therefore the necessity of its avoidance. This message on the surface certainly makes sense. But does it make sense when it comes to responding to the Japanese attack on the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor? Did it make sense in the Soviet Union's response in resisting the Reich's invasion of late June 1940? Does it make sense now for Judt to recommend a kind of pacifism in response to what he sees as a relatively harmless, scattered Islamic terror threat? Judt sees much but he deliberately scants much else. In his dismissal of the concept of Islamofascism he points to the less than state power of so many of the groups involved. But why does he deliberately omit discussing the major 'contractor' Iran ? And why does he ignore the role of Saudi Arabia in funding the propaganda war aimed at spreading Islam throughout the West? Judt writes that the world today looks back on the twentieth century from narrow, partisan, ethnic perspective. He laments the broader picture which for instance Europeans had after the French Revolution, the Enlightentment that preceeded it. He even believes that the West did have a certain perspective on its nineteenth century history understanding turning point events. He argues that a larger picture and larger lessons from the twentieth century have not emerged. He especically criticizes Americans saying that the absence of massive civilian American casualties means that the country unlike the Europeans does not really understand what War is. He argues thus that European reluctance to War is in fact a sign of their mature knoweldge and understanding. They got it , and America did not. One wonders how they would have gotten it had the United States not rescued Europe in the Second War. One wonders too how the Europeans will get it in the future should the growing Islamic power within and without undermine the traditional bases of their societies. Judt above all seems to imply that 'Peace' can be imposed by one side upon another. He does not seem to want to recognize the reality that their are violently, aggressive, expansionist forces which can be answered only by physical resistance. His mocking of the clash of civilizations, his underplaying of what some have called Global Jihad marks a major shortcoming of the work.
He does not understand too that the very confusion of the pacifistic, appeasing stance is precisely that which encourages War, that the lesson of Chamberlain as appeaser is still the right and real one. Evil needs to be Resisted, however painful that is. This is the true message of the reappraisal of twentieth century events- and not the one Judt gives.
I would add one word upon a theme not seen by some as central to Judt's reappraisal . It has to do with his own former support of Israel to his now becoming an advocate of a binational state i.e.A state in which the Arab element would become predominant meaning the end of the world's only Jewish state. Judt's reppraisal in this sense led him into the very murky scholarly waters of supporting the dubious research of Walt- Mearsheimer which predicated the ridiculous notion that American foreign policy in the Middle East is a knee- jerk reaction to the Israel Lobby. Tell that to the State Department. Judt's endorsement of such shoddy work raises the question of whether his own far more rigorous and careful scholarship is not seriously tainted by his biased reappraisal of Jewish history and society.
Perhaps what Judt most urgently needs now is an honest reppraisal of his own reappraisal . That is a volume I would certainly look forward to reading.
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