Thinking out loud: an oral history of the twentieth century, dictated on his deathbed, shows that Tony Judt was, to the end, the consummate public intellectual.

• Author: O'Donnell, Michael
• Position: Thinking the Twentieth Century - Book review

Thinking the Twentieth Century

by Tony Judt, with Timothy Snyder

Penguin Press HC, 432 pp.

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Tony Judt died nearly two years ago, yet he keeps writing books. A historian of Europe, an essayist for the New York Review of Books, and an outspoken public intellectual, Judt died in August 2010 after a long and public struggle with Lou Gehrig's disease. During the final years of his life he was extraordinarily productive. In 2005 he published Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a massive and erudite volume that quickly became the standard work on the subject. It would have been the culminating achievement of any academic career, but Judt kept working. Over the following four years, he wrote a fine essay collection and a polemic about European-style social democracy. Three months after he died, his exquisite memoir The Memory Chalet appeared. He had composed it by night during bouts of insomnia and dictated it by day after losing the use of his hands. At once fearless and moving, the book went some way toward softening the image of a fierce debater and critic who in his day had bloodied many noses.

Thinking the Twentieth Century is an unusual book that was produced in collaboration with the historian Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin). Judt explains that he had been planning a study of the intellectual history of the twentieth century when he received his terminal diagnosis. Snyder, a colleague and fellow expert on eastern Europe, proposed salvaging the idea by collaborating on an oral history. Over the course of months, Snyder and Judt held a series of lengthy conversations about the topics Judt had meant to explore: Europe, America, communism, capitalism, Jews, French intellectuals, World War II, the role of the historian, the role of the state. The edited transcripts of these conversations became the book. Before the dialogue sections of each chapter appear autobiographical reflections composed by Judt. He completed the afterword just a month before dying. Poignantly, halfway through the book Judt mentions an ambition to turn next to the history of trains. But Thinking the Twentieth Century will be his last.

The book does and does not work. In its favor, it is an engaging and unusually detailed conversation, exploring topics far more deeply than Judt could do in debates or media interviews, Judt's gift for exceptionally clear writing extended to speaking extemporaneously. From the range and detail of his responses to questions that he did not receive in advance, it is clear that his mind continued whirring to the end. The combination of autobiography and dialogue produces a broad intellectual portrait of a major voice in American public life, one that would have helped illuminate the big events of the past two years: the Arab Spring, the American presidential election, and the crisis in Europe, to name just three.

Working against the book is the lurking feeling that two people have run off with the conversation and are ignoring the other guests at the table. Judt was unique...