The memory chalet - Tony Judt

Final reflections on a happy life-from acclaimed historian Tony
Judt.

Tony Judt's The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any other.
Each essay brings the smallest details of personal experience into the
larger frame of history. Judt's youthful love of a London bus route
becomes a reflection on public civility. Food and trains and smells all
come alive as Judt takes us from the postwar London of his childhood
through Paris, Prague, and points east to New York, where he found his
home. Judt brings his moral clarity and wit to bear on everything from
fast cars to radical politics and, finally, the devastating illness
that took his life. This book, composed when Judt was paralyzed and
unable physically to write, found its shape in the ordered rooms of a
Swiss Chalet of the mind: a warm refuge in the closing darkness of his
final years.