Before his death from ALS, Tony Judt unexpectedly blossomed into an intellectual titan: penning a history of post-WWII Europe, writing essays for the New York Review of Books, and collecting reminiscences of his lifetime. And just as luckily for us, all of those found print—Europe in the critically-acclaimed Postwar, his last essays in Ill Fares the Land, and his memoir in The Memory Chalet.

Yet Thinking the Twentieth Century is an altogether stranger beast: Judt's last work, which by necessity took the form of a conversation between himself and fellow-historian Timothy Snyder. Interspersed with Judt's own remembrances of his personal/professional trajectory and other topics, he and Snyder begin to trace how exactly liberalism won out over totalitarianism—first in the form of fascism, and then in the long grind against communism. This victory was by no means assured, and seemed impossible at points in the 30s and 40s. Yet it happened, and they tease out how exactly that victory was won.

It's not a book for everyone to be sure, and you'd be better-served tackling one of Judt's other more traditional works first. But it's a marvelous chronicle of a mind at work, and sadly the last one we'll get.