Volume 55, Number 15 · October 9, 2008
A Case of Intellectual Independence
By Jonathan Freedland
Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
by Tony Judt
Penguin, 448 pp., $29.95
There are not many professors in any field equipped to produce, for example, learned essays on the novels of Primo Levi and the writings of the now- forgotten Manès Sperber—yet also able to turn their hand to, say, a close, diplomatic analysis of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Analysts of international relations, confident and polemical on the evolution of the European Union, exist, but few of them could deliver an erudite lecture on the oeuvre of Albert Camus. Scholars who could analyze the peculiarly Polish dimension of the theology of Karol Wojty a, the last pope, are doubtless in plentiful supply. But not many of them could sketch a humane, fully informed portrait of the work of Edward Said.
Review, 3735 words
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