About this title: 'With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Abacus
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780349100135ISBN:0349100136
Description: Good. No Jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Pictorial paperback, neat name and date to fep, rub to edges internally clean, bright and tight. Slight lean to spine. In good condition. read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: LITTLE, BROWN BOOK GROUP Country = UNITED KINGDOM
Date Published: 1991
ISBN-13:9780349100135ISBN:0349100136
Description: BRAND NEW PAPERBACK. 400 pages. (400 pages) primo levi's classic memoir of the camps. map edition new ed (Paperback) read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Penguin, Harmondsworth: New York [etc. ]
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780140047233ISBN:0140047239
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Penguin Modern Classics paperback, 1979. Good + / Very Good condition. 380 p.; 19 cm. Penguin modern classics.. The first work is a translation of Se questo è un uomo, the second work a translation of La tregua. read more
Edition: NEW ED
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company (UK), UK
ISBN-13:9780349100135ISBN:0349100136
Description: New. Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. Two works of autobiography. If This is a Man tells of Levi's experiences as a victim of the Holocaust, from his arrest by the Fascists in 1943 to the liberation of Auschwitz by the Russians. The Truce is the story of his eight-month journey back to Italy after he was liberated. ISBN10: 0349100136. read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly shipped from our UK warehouse using Royal Mail International Priority mail. Heavier or more expensive books are shipped with a TRACKING NUMBER. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Description: New. DISPATCHED FROM UNITED KINGDOM. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Please note orders are confirmed immediately and may take 2-3 business days to ship. This processing time is in addition to the shipping time. Please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Brand new item. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: G20091121062735D. read more
Description: New. PLEASE NOTE: All books are promptly imported from the UK using DHL or Royal Mail international mail WITH TRACKING NUMBER. Delivery is typically 5-10 working days. Please do not select expedited shipping. Professional and reliable bookseller (est.1987). read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: PENGUIN BOOKS
Date Published: 1979
ISBN-13:9780140047233ISBN:0140047239
Description: Published by Penguin Books in 1979. Hardback with Dust jacket. Number of pages: 384. Condition: Good. Used book but in Good Condition for sensible price. Wear to head & tail of spine. Internally good. Shipped from UK. Delivery is usually 2-3 working days from order by Royal Mail, International Delivery is by Airmail. read more
"I´m working as a tour guide in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen and Primo Levi´s description of his life in Auschwitz have been invaluable for my understanding of the Holocaust. It is a magnificent book, probably one of the best to have been written in the 20th century."
"It is hard for me to translate my experience of this book to words. It's not that my feelings are ambiguous, or even that I can't find the right words; my problem is that it created such an emotional and intellectual response from me, that I'm finding it difficult to know where to start, or how much of it really belongs in a review.
This is actually two books in one: "If This is a Man" recounts Primo Levi's experience of entering and living on one of the Auschwitz concentration camps, and "The Truce" follows his struggle to return home after leaving the camp. Levi writes in a remarkably contained, almost dispassionate way, which, as he explains in the afterword, is not only a consequence of his analytical and scientific mind, but also an attempt to create a valuable and valid witness account, unaffected by strong emotions.
Primo Levi was twenty-four years-old when he entered the camp (or Lager, as it was known), which is how old I am at the moment, so I couldn't help comparing myself to him, and wondering how I would have reacted to what he and countless others went through. It's difficult to imagine. The whole of the "If This is a Man" book is filled with innumerable examples of the horrific events that took place, but the one that most profoundly affected me was the "treatment" they received on the day of their arrival. Here is a group of human beings, torn from their normal lives and homes, slowly being transformed into something that is only a shadow of themselves, at best. In a matter of days, what defines them as human is reduced to nothing. This was a deliberate effect from the Nazi's part, since it was easier to perpetrate unspeakable horrors to beasts, to shadows, than to something you could recognize as a human being. It's an honest, deep-felt and terribly empathic description of what he felt and what he saw in the eyes of others, and it's chilling to the bone.
After this first part, "The Truce" is almost a relief. Although also filled with a lot of suffering and miserable conditions, it is nothing compared to what went on before, and like Levi, I felt myself recovering, almost forgetting the most gruesome details of what I had just read before.
I guess that's the way the human mind works, and I really believe that, were it not from the survival's stories and the effort on the different nations' part to keep the concentration camps as a testament of those times, humanity would, sooner or later, forget what happened, or at least remember it like we remember the Inquisition, or the Napoleon Wars. Bloody events, but events that lack the human, individual side that is necessary for true empathy and understanding. World War II will remain as a terrible scar in history of the World, but the collective memory will dwindle, and we need books like this to remind us, those who weren't there, who didn't go through it or anything like it, of how low humankind can go, and has been, and will in all probability go again."
"This is so far off the scale for cool, considered reponse....
There are such a plethora of Holocaust memoirs now that we can become a little swamped with the banality of unimaginable horror. And so when I read this the real impact for me was in the depiction of a Europe so smashed that only pieces remained.
The details: the Aushwitz prisoners 'liberated' by the Soviets, and watching the movie 'Typhoon' in a shack in the middle of Belorussia (?). I'd only seen the movie myself the week before I'd read this."
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