<I>"It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head..." -TJ </I> <BR><BR> One of our leading historians, Tony Judt has written extensively about the twentieth century in the bestselling <I>Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Ill Fares the Land</I>, and <I>Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century</I>. A master of historical analysis forced into nights of motionless contemplation, Judt discovered the depths of his own memory. Bolstered by his fierce intelligence and decades of scholarship, childhood sights and sounds grew to take on vast new meanings. <BR><BR> <I>The Memory Chalet</I> is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before collapsing into the certainty that his generation 'was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution.' A series of roadtrips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual change in citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt's attention; but for us, he has forced his reflections into an iron-hard arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet-an unchanging refuge, lost in the mountains of memory. <BR><BR>