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If This Is A Man/The Truce by Primo Levi, Translated by Stuart Woolf

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If This Is A Man/The Truce

Publisher
Little, Brown Book Group
Publish Date
4 December 2014
Run Time
16 hours 24 minutes
Format
Audiobook

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What to expect

"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

Critics Review

  • 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

    Guardian

  • 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.

    Philippe Sands

  • 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

    Philip Roth

  • 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

    David Baddiel

See more reviews
  • [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

    Independent

  • A life-changing book

    Daily Express

  • Among the best literature of the twentieth century

    Atlantic

  • A powerful reminder of what it means to be human

    The Conversation

User Reviews

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Details

Author
Primo Levi, Translated by Stuart Woolf
Narrator
Henry Goodman
Duration
16 hours 24 minutes
Release Date
4 December 2014
ISBN
9781405528207
Format
Audiobook
Publisher
Little, Brown Book Group
Genre
Memoirs, Biography: historical, political and military, The Holocaust, Second World War

Synopsis

"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

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