When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010

by Tony Judt Narrated by Sean Pratt

Overview

In an age in which the lack of independent public intellectuals has often been sorely lamented, the historian Tony Judt played a rare and valuable role, bringing together history and current events, Europe and America, what was and what is with what should be. In When the Facts Change, Tony Judt's widow and fellow historian Jennifer Homans has assembled an essential collection of the most important and influential pieces written in the last fifteen years of Judt's life, the years in which he found his voice in the public sphere. Included are seminal essays on the full range of Judt's concerns, including Europe as an idea and in reality, before 1989 and thereafter; Israel, the Holocaust and the Jews; American hyperpower and the world after 9/11; and issues of social inclusion and social justice in an age of increasing inequality. Judt was at once most at home and in a state of what he called internal exile from his native England, from Europe, and from America, and he finally settled in New York-between them all. He was a historian of the twentieth century acutely aware of the dangers of ethnic exceptionalism, and if he was shaped by anything, it was the Jewish past and his own secularism. His essays on Israel ignited a firestorm debate for their forthright criticisms of Israeli government polices relating to the Palestinians and the occupied territories. Those crucial pieces are published here in book form for the first time, including an essay, never previously published, called “What Is to Be Done?” These pieces are suffused with a deep compassion for the Israeli dilemma, a compassion that instilled in Judt a sense of responsibility to speak out and try to find a better path, away from what he saw as a road to ruin.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Samuel Moyn

This new and presumably last of Judt's collections of scintillating journalism runs the gamut of his interests…When the Facts Change ranges from the excitement of 1989 through the agonies of post-9/11 foreign policy to our parlous domestic circumstances after the financial crash. It also includes some of the pen portraits for which Judt was deservedly famous. Taken together, these essays also paint his own portrait…This collection is a reminder of Judt's clear mind and prose and, as Homans says in her lovely introduction, his fidelity to hard facts and to honest appraisals of the modern scene.

From the Publisher

Tony Judt was a historian whose journalism includes some of the finest things he wrote . . . In an era of growing anti-intellectualism, his essays remind us of what we gain when we stick fast to high ethical and intellectual standards, and what is lost when we let them slip.” —Mark Mazower, Financial Times

“Scintillating journalism . . . This collection is a reminder of Judt’s clear mind and prose and, as Homans says in her lovely introduction, his fidelity to hard facts and to honest appraisal of the modern scene. . . . No wonder this book, and Judt’s assumption of the role of political critic after the Cold War, remain so relevant.” —Samuel Moyn, The New York Times Book Review

Tony Judt

Mark Mazower, Financial Times: 
“Tony Judt was a historian whose journalism includes some of the finest things he wrote... In an era of growing anti-intellectualism, his essays remind us of what we gain when we stick fast to high ethical and intellectual standards, and what is lost when we let them slip.”

Samuel Moyn, The New York Times Book Review: 
“Scintillating journalism... This collection is a reminder of Judt’s clear mind and prose and, as Homans says in her lovely introduction, his fidelity to hard facts and to honest appraisal of the modern scene.... No wonder this book, and Judt’s assumption of the role of political critic after the Cold War, remain so relevant.”

Library Journal

08/01/2014
Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, Judt was a major intellectual force whose books and essays shaped how we look at the world. The collection Reappraisals (2008) focused on 20th-century Europe; here, his widow, the historian Jennifer Homans, brings us more essays by framing this second collection as a showcase of how Judt's thought evolved.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171387778
Publisher:	Ascent Audio
Publication date:	02/01/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The only way for me to write this introduction is to separate the man from the ideas. Otherwise, I get pulled back into the man, who I loved and was married to from 1993 until his death in 2010, rather than forward into the ideas. As you read these essays, I hope that you, too, will focus on the ideas, because they are good ideas, and they were written in good faith. “In good faith” may have been Tony’s favorite phrase and highest standard, and he held himself to it in everything he wrote. What he meant by it, I think, was writing that is free of calculation and maneuver, intellectual or otherwise. A clean, clear, honest account.

This is a book about our age. The arc is down: from the heights of hope and possibility, with the revolutions of 1989, into the confusion, devastation, and loss of 9/11, the Iraq war, the deepening crisis in the Middle East, and—as Tony saw it—the self-defeating decline of the American republic. As the facts changed and events unfolded, Tony found himself turned increasingly and unhappily against the current, fighting with all of his intellectual might to turn the ship of ideas, however slightly, in a different direction. The story ends abruptly, with his untimely death.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "When the Facts Change"
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