If I started the year with a bit of a rant about how crap life is for my generation (my generation – who am I, Pete Townshend?) and how we're being shafted every which way (Oxford housing market, I'm looking at you), then I've just picked up a continuation on theme. If Jilted Generation was the angry teenage rebel, Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land is the more measured, reasoned, but no less impassioned older brother.
The last book published by the prominent historian before his death last year, it is both a reflection on how we live today, our culture and the cancer of consumption and selfishness that is eating away at society. It asks why we only seek a bigger life, rather than a better one, and why we no longer care for each other. Drawing upon years of history, learning lessons from the past, it demonstrates that how we live now is not alwasy how we have lived, that things were different and that they can be again. The problem is that we have forgotten how to ask the right questions, and even when we do, we no longer know how to answer them.
Elegant and spare, yet full of humanity and passion for our species, it reaches out across the world, not just Europe and North America, but to the rest of the globe that is being affected by the Westernisation of life and the ills that come associated. I want to do something about it all. I want to make a difference. I agree with an awful lot of what has been put forward. What worries me is perhaps not even that I can't, it's that even having read this, I still don't know how and it saddens me deeply. I wonder if I am alone?
Book number: 43
Title: Ill Fares the Land
Author: Tony Judt
Category: Non-fiction
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