Freedland further stated that Judt had demonstrated "through more than a decade of essays written for America's foremost journals... that he belongs to each one of those rare, polymathic categories." In reviewing Judt's "Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century", Freedland wrote that Judt had put conscience ahead of friendship during his life, and demanded the same courage in others. In 2009, Judt was awarded a Special Orwell Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his contribution to British political writing. Some of his peers had a more critical view of Judt. Dylan Riley of the University of California, Berkeley, argued that Judt was more of a pamphleteer and a polemicist than a historian, and that he changed his views without hesitation or good reason. In September 2008, Judt was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. From October 2009, he was paralyzed from the neck down. He was nevertheless able to give a two-hour public lecture. In January 2010 Judt wrote a short article about his condition, the first of a series of memoirs published in the "New York Review of Books". In March 2010, Judt was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air", and in June he was interviewed by the BBC's disability affairs correspondent Peter White for the Radio 4 programme "No Triumph, No Tragedy". Judt died of ALS at his home in Manhattan on 6 August 2010. This was two weeks after a major interview and retrospective of his work in "Prospect" magazine and the day before an article about his illness was published in the "Irish Independent" indicating that he "won't surrender any time soon" and comparing his suffering to that of author Terry Pratchett, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's disease in 2007. Shortly before his death, according to "The Guardian", he was said to have possessed the "liveliest mind in New York." He continued his work as a public intellectual right up until his death, writing essays for the "New York Review of Books" and composing and completing a synthetic intellectual history under the title "Thinking The Twentieth Century" with fellow historian Timothy D. Snyder. Judt also wrote a memoir entitled "The Memory Chalet", which was published posthumously in November 2010. During his illness, Judt made use of the memory palace technique to remember paragraphs of text during the night, which he placed mentally in rooms of a Swiss chalet and then dictated to his assistant the next day.