Postwar

Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945
Tony Judt

Postwar is certainly an informative, bordering on comprehensive and essential, survey of its subject, but the writing finally isn’t strong enough to sustain a work of such length. A useful companion to Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, it never achieves the same easy grace of expression and compression. Judt’s major themes – Europe’s diminishment on the global stage, the evolution of a “European model” of state politics, the ethnic homogenization (and looming de-homogenization) of its populations – could have been made more forcefully with less detail and opinionizing, including the repetitive animus toward the French and even more repetitive straining to enshrine the Holocaust as the major generative fact of postwar Europe.