The Memory Chalet-Quality Guarantee

Description

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Bookof the Year

Final reflections on a happy life-from acclaimed historian TonyJudt.

Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any essay brings the smallest details of personal experience into thelarger frame of history. Judt’s youthful love of a London bus routebecomes a reflection on public civility. Food and trains and smells allcome alive as Judt takes us from the postwar London of his childhoodthrough Paris, Prague, and points east to New York, where he found hishome. Judt brings his moral clarity and wit to bear on everything fromfast cars to radical politics and, finally, the devastating illnessthat took his life. This book, composed when Judt was paralyzed andunable physically to write, found its shape in the ordered rooms of aSwiss Chalet of the mind: a warm refuge in the closing darkness of hisfinal 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.