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August 07, 2010

Comments

Sheila

I adored Tony Judt, too. Just a few months ago he bothered to send me a short email telling me how much he appreciated knowing that he had far flung readers. I'm not a famous person.
And he bothered. I will print it and frame it. I was so moved.

ivan e

Indeed a giant loss ... reading his books makes you reflect on what it should be to be a human.

Niall

I agree with you on all points. The only good thing about ALS is that it runs its course fairly quickly. How very sad.

Shelley

Oh my God--this is the first I heard of it. What a loss to those of us who are writers, as Sheila says. And I had just discovered him.

Maybe we should comfort ourselves by saying that at least he is at peace. I dreaded what he was going to have to go through.

mr.max

I agree fully with your comments. I never met him but also felt a bond to him through my deep connection with his wise words and sensibility.

aşk sözleri

I'm so sorry ... a great loss

Frank Tempone

Chauncey Mabe called his essays his personal graduate program.

Lisa

I did know him personally and you are right to admire him. I was one of his students at NYU. A brave and brilliant person. This is such a loss to the field of history.

Judith markoff hansen

I am sitting reading Reappraisals and thinking how much we have lost in losing Tony Judt. We humans don't have a lot of backups to fill his void. Not all people are replaceable.
I can only hope that somewhere there are other huge hearted, wise and brilliant people who will come forth and take up where he has left off. They will be his best legacy.
And to his dear family I can only say thank you for letting us share him too.

Sean S.

Postwar already had a permanent place in my book collection. Sad news.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."