If This Is A Man/The Truce

'Miraculous' Philippe Sands

By: Primo Levi, Stuart Woolf - translator

Narrated by: Henry Goodman

"With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, 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 most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH©2014 Primo Levi

Critic reviews

The death of Primo Levi robs Italy of one of its finest writers . . . One of the few survivors of the Holocaust to speak of his experiences with a gentle voice

Levi's voice is especially affecting, so clear, firm and gentle, yet humane and apparently untouched by anger, bitterness or self-pity. If This Is a Man is miraculous, finding the human in every individual who traverses its pages, whether a Häftling (prisoner) or Muselmann ("the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection"), a kapo or a guard.

With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, 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... One of the greatest human testaments of the era

There are other Holocaust testimonies, but Levi's is the first, and the most focused... Written before the genre existed, it reads more straightforwardly like a record... It is a meticulously presented diary of hell

[What] gave it such power... was the sheer, unmitigated truth of it; the sense of what a book could achieve in terms of expanding one's own knowledge and understanding at a single sitting... few writers have left such a legacy... A necessary book

A life-changing book

Among the best literature of the twentieth century

A powerful reminder of what it means to be human

The stuff of nightmares

I've read/listened to a bunch of Holocaust memoirs and this is by far the most detailed account, and thus most disturbing, one I've come across.

Eye-opening

This book was eye-opening to me. The truth of Holocaust that not everyone is aware of. I really hope this book will reach the younger generation of Americans

Incredible

A powerful eloquent memoir read beautifully. Life changing enriching and chastizing our own easy journey.

top notch

listen to It if you Can at all. really interesting and important. Primo Levi lives

An interesting insight

A good read for those of the younger generation to understand how bad the human race can be to itself. The book covers Levi's life in the camps and his long journey home after the defeat of Germany. The part in the camp fills the reader with disgust at how such a human condition can be allowed to happen. The journey home is something of which most readers will be unaware (I would have assumed the survivors were fixed up and sent home) although it does drag in parts.