Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
The definitive history of postwar Europe, from the rubble of 1945 to the EU's eastward expansion, by a historian who lived through much of it and understood it all. Judt wrote it while dying of ALS, which gives its closing meditation on European memory a particular gravity. An 800-page book that reads like a novel.
Judt quotes and cites statistics but “does not always bother to properly reference them,” which readers and a prize committee both flagged as a real gap for a book this authoritative. Whole categories barely appear, science and food and crime and art and women, and pre-1985 Soviet internal history is thin. There is no single overarching thesis, more a “rag bag of fragments” than one argument, and where the theorising takes over “the more Theory intrudes, the farther History recedes.” It is “dense and very long.” And it stops at 2005, so it has nothing on the financial crisis, Brexit, or the populist wave that followed.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
