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Fresh Air Remembers Historian Tony Judt

Tony Judt, the British historian and the author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, died Friday from complications of Lou Gehrig's disease. He was 62.

Judt chronicled his illness in a series of essays he wrote for The New York Review of Books, describing the effects of slowly losing his ability to walk, talk and do seemingly simple tasks -- like scratch his back in the middle of the night. He discussed his diagnosis on Fresh Air earlier in 2010, explaining what it was like to live with the motor-neuron disorder and how he hoped his family would remember him.

We remember Tony Judt today with excerpts from that interview. The full conversation, originally broadcast on March 29, is reproduced below.

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