The Past Speaks

“Tony Judt, the lauded and controversial historian whose work took on communists, Zionists, monetarists and finally the degenerative disease that trapped him in his own body, has died. He was 62.”

See more here.

WorldCat’s Author Profile for Judt has some interesting bibliometric data about his career.  During his lifetime, Judt generated 51 works in 110 publications in 11 languages. His works are now held in 7,844 libraries worldwide. That’s fine monument, I would say.

Judt wrote books targeted at different audience levels. If we assign a value of 0.01 to a book that large numbers of children can read and 1.00 to a book that only a true academic specialist could penetrate, the average audience level of his books was 0.66. His most accessible book was his best-seller Postwar: a History of Europe Since 1945, which comes in at 0.53.  This book was praised by  top scholars and read by ordinary people on the subway. It is the dream of most history professors to write books of that sort. Postwar‘s Amazon.ca Sales Rank is #161 in Books. Being the 161st most popular book in Canada isn’t bad for a thick work of historical scholarship.