Two explorers set out on a journey from which only one of them will return. Their unknown land is that often fearsome continent we call the 20th Century. Their route is through their own minds and memories. Both travellers are professional historians still tormented by their own unanswered questions. They needed to talk to one another, and the time was short.

This is a book about the past, but it is also an argument for the kind of future we should strive for.Thinking the Twentieth Centuryis about the life of the mind - and the mindful life.

Tony Judt was one of the great historians and public intellectuals of his time. Educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, he taught at Cambridge, Oxford and Berkeley. He was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies at New York University, as well as the founder and director of the Remarque Institute, dedicated to creating an ongoing conversation between Europe and America.The author or editor of fourteen books, Professor Judt was a frequent contributor toThe New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic,andThe New York Times.

Timothy Snyder studied at Brown and Oxford, held fellowships in Paris, Warsaw and Vienna and at Harvard, and is The Houslum Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of five award-winning and critically-acclaimed books of European history; the most recent of which, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, won the Leipzig Prize for European Understanding, was named a book of the year by a dozen publications and has beentranslated into twenty-five languages.

The final masterpiece by one of the leading historians and thinkers of his generation, the late Tony Judt.

Thinking the Twentieth Century unites the conflicted intellectual history of an epoch into a soaring narrative.