Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century Tony Judt As Tony Judt argues persuasively in Reappraisals, we have entered an 'age of forgetting'. Today's world is so utterly unlike the world of just twenty years ago that we have set aside our immediate past even before we could make sense of it. We literally don't know where we came from, and the results of this burgeoning ignorance are proving calamitous, with the clear prospect of worse to come. We have lost touch with three generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such vital issues of public policy and we have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects key aspects of the world we have lost and reminds us how important they still are to us: now and to our hopes for the future. Judt draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects: From Jewish intellectuals and the challenge of "evil" in the recent European past to the interpretation of the Cold War; from the rise and fall of the state in public affairs to the displacement of history by 'heritage'. Ranging with his trademark acuity and elan from Belgium to Israel, from the memory of Marxism to the practice of foreign policy, he takes us beyond what we think we know of the past to explain how we came to know it, and shows how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we urgently need. Tony Judt was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley, and New York University, where he is currently university professor and director of the Remarque Institute […] The author or editor of twelve books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and The New York Times. His most recent book, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of 2005, the winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2007 he was awarded the Hannah Arendt Prize.