Some of you may be familiar with Tony Judt, the British historian of the 20th century who died in 2010 and is probably best known for his magnum opus Postwar (see also my review), a history of Europe between 1945 and 2005. Since I found that book highly impressive on the whole, his collection of essays published as Reappraisals - Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century caught my attention as well.
The essays, most of which are structured around the review of a particular biography or monography but also discuss the subject more generally, are divided into four parts. In the first two parts, the essays focus each time on one notable twentieth century personality, such as Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, Pope John Paul II and a number of others. The third part contains essays on individual countries in Europe (France, the UK, Belgium, Romania) as well as two about Israel. The fourth part has the essays about the US, for the most part about US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Judt was born in Britain of immigrant parents, and was politically active from quite a young age, going through several phases in which he associated with various left-wing movements, including Communism and left-wing Zionism (he was Jewish, and spent several summers working in a kibbutz in Israel), before ending up as a devoted left-wing liberal, in both meanings of the term, the European one and the American one, since much of his professional career was spent at New York University.
Not very surprisingly, his political views are much more present in many of these essays than they were in Postwar, and a few are strongly polemic, like the one at the end of the book where he favourably compares modern Europe with the United States, and concludes that Britain falls somewhere inbetween. The essays are well worth reading regardless of whether one agrees with him, though. I particularly liked his two essays on Israel (one about the Six Days War, one about Israel's complicated mixture of strength and vulnerability in the image it projects abroad), as well as the paragraphs in the introduction touching on the differences between the US and Europe in terms of how the military is seen - inextricably linked to their very different experiences of war over the past century or so.
There is also, as noted, an essay about Belgium, somewhat reminiscent of a chapter on the same subject in Postwar, though having in fact been written earlier, in 1999. In my review of that book, I noted that the weak spots and inaccuracies in Judt's writing about Belgium made me wonder how far I could trust him about countries I was less familiar with. After reading the essay in Reappraisals, I'm just going to conclude that there is something particular about Belgium that not only bothers Judt, but also makes him bizarrely irrational and leads him wrong on even easily checked facts. At one point he complains that "when someone speaks Dutch on Walloon television (and vice versa), subtitles are provided", leading one to wonder just what he proposes as alternative solution, and whether there are in fact any multilingual countries where television channels in one language simply broadcast interviews in other languages spoken in that country without any subtitles, dubbing or other kind of translation whatsoever. I strongly doubt it, but I'm not actually sure (what Judt neglects to mention, although in fairness it's possible that this is a more recent phenomenon, is the much more notable and much funnier point that Flemish television often subtitles people speaking Flemish). I suppose Belgium really is very complicated for outsiders to understand; Judt is welcome to his very negative opinion about it, but it would be nice if he would at least get the facts right and keep things in perspective - many things that he seems to regard as somehow uniquely Belgian are absolutely no such thing. In one case - "even today Belgum is the only country in Europe where identification with the immediate locality trumps regional or national affiliation in the popular imagination", I am not quite sure that he's wrong, and would be interested in seeing a serious comparison on the issue, but his record in the rest of the essay hardly inspires confidence in the accuracy of that statement.
Negativity is something that is found in most of the essays in one form or another - Judt is a very critical reviewer and thinker, and in some cases absolutely ruthless (the essay about the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser is essentially one big hatchet job, though in fairness it does seem like Althusser made things extremely easy for his critics). Many of the essays have a short note at the end mentioning the polemic or heated discussion that followed their publication, it's kind of a shame that those have not been included in the book (though I realize that would have been impractical to say the least), as polemic articles or essays tend to be most interesting when read together with their (attempted) rebuttals.
As a whole, this is definitely an interesting read, the essays are varied enough to appeal to a wide range of people interested in recent history, politics and political philosophy. They are also opinionated enough that most readers will probably find much to disagree with, but in my case at least, even the passages I most disagreed with were still interesting and original enough to be worth the read.
