The Pleasure of Concentration
I finally - probably not for the last time - started reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder . That may sound suspicious: admitting two authors is generally a bad sign for a book, but here it was a necessary conceit. Tony Judt was an eminent moral historian who was struck down with ALS (the illness made famous / trivialised by 2014’s ice bucket challenge fad): Snyder is an American historian of Eastern Europe who faded in and out of Judt’s comet trail over the years and who decided that Judt’s own history, views and development over the decades needed to be captured before the inevitable, swift, end. So this is a “spoken book”, a conversation between two colleagues speaking and discussing at eye level, rather than an interview between a professional journalist and a professional of something else entirely. Judt and Snyder by necessity follow in the Eastern European tradition of such transcribed conversations. I’m looking forward to discoveri