Last Rites
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John Lukacs
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Format: ClothPrice: $56.00
A master historian offers an eloquent and personal auto-history of his life and his ideas
Twenty years ago, John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs in Confessions of an Original Sinner, an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy. Now, in Last Rites, he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history and human knowledge with private memories of his wives and loves, and enhancing the book with footnotes from his idiosyncratic diaries. The resulting volume is fascinating and delightful—an auto-history by a passionate, authentic, brilliant, and witty man.
Lukacs begins with a concise rendering of a historical understanding of our world (essential reading for any historian), then follows with trenchant observations on his life in the United States, commentary on his native Hungary and the new meanings it took for him after 1989, and deeply personal portraits of his three wives, about whom he has not written before. He includes also a chapter on his formative memories of May and June 1940 and of Winston Churchill, a subject in some of Lukacs’s later studies. Last Rites is a richly layered summation combined with a set of extraordinary observations—an original book only John Lukacs could have written.
Praise for Confessions of an Original Sinner:
“[Lukacs] is an often witty and always fascinating—even entertaining—writer.”—Washington Post
John Lukacs is an internationally read and praised historian, the author of some thirty books, a winner of numerous academic honors and awards, past president of the American Catholic Historical Association, and a member of the Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom. He lives in Phoenixville, PA.
“John Lukacs, one of the master historians of the second half of the twentieth century, is distinguished by the quality of his prose almost as much as by the quality of his mind.”—Stanley G. Payne, author of Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany, and World War II
“Last Rites will provoke protest, reflection, argument, doubt, wonderment—all excellent things.”—Hugh Brogan, author of Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life
“His language is classical, but his literary character—perhaps I should say his heart—is Romantic.”—Hugh Brogan, author of Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life
Publication Date: February 24, 2009
