Thought readers of ALS Spread the Word would find this New York magazine feature interesting-
Since being diagnosed with ALS, historian Tony Judt has worked on three books, re-sparked old feuds, and, as writer Wesley Yang explains in this week’s New York, cemented his reputation as the city’s most spirited public intellectual, paralysis be damned:
The essay was unlike anything he had written before: an intimate view of the author’s private anguish. “I can’t remember another piece of memoiristic writing that created such waves of interest in our little pond,” says the writer and Columbia professor Todd Gitlin. It was not, however, the whole of his written output. After spending a few months absorbing the shock of his diagnosis eighteen months ago, Judt has become enormously prolific: dictating essays and opinion pieces, delivering a public lecture to a packed auditorium, and assembling material for three books, one of which—a rallying cry on behalf of a renewed social democracy—will be published next week. Consigned to a broken body but perfectly sound in mind, he has acquired something of a second presence beyond that of a historian and public intellectual—a figure whose pathos haunts the thoughts of others. “There are many days now where I find myself thinking about Tony Judt,” says Gitlin, “and I hardly even know him.”
Read on: http://nymag.com/news/features/64626/
Thanks,
Jill Weiskopf
Public Relations Manager
New York Media
212-508-0656
Since being diagnosed with ALS, historian Tony Judt has worked on three books, re-sparked old feuds, and, as writer Wesley Yang explains in this week’s New York, cemented his reputation as the city’s most spirited public intellectual, paralysis be damned:
The essay was unlike anything he had written before: an intimate view of the author’s private anguish. “I can’t remember another piece of memoiristic writing that created such waves of interest in our little pond,” says the writer and Columbia professor Todd Gitlin. It was not, however, the whole of his written output. After spending a few months absorbing the shock of his diagnosis eighteen months ago, Judt has become enormously prolific: dictating essays and opinion pieces, delivering a public lecture to a packed auditorium, and assembling material for three books, one of which—a rallying cry on behalf of a renewed social democracy—will be published next week. Consigned to a broken body but perfectly sound in mind, he has acquired something of a second presence beyond that of a historian and public intellectual—a figure whose pathos haunts the thoughts of others. “There are many days now where I find myself thinking about Tony Judt,” says Gitlin, “and I hardly even know him.”
Read on: http://nymag.com/news/features/64626/
Thanks,
Jill Weiskopf
Public Relations Manager
New York Media
212-508-0656
No comments:
Post a Comment