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Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
A Witness to Barbarism I have meant to read this for a long time, and the wait was worth it. Levi - certainly in translation - writes the most beautiful, spare prose. Despite the grisly and appalling subject matter, what shines through is the humanity of not only the author but some of the other characters. 'If This Is A Man' was written within a couple of years of the author's return home to Italy, and this surely accounts for the clarity of recall and description. It is no surprise that Levi achieved 'legendary' status before... more info
Indispensible - a necessary read If you want to understand the holocaust, how and why it happened, then you need to read If This Is A Man. Levi dispenses with his emotional responses and describes what happened with a frightening detachment. Through his eyes, Levi shows us how the Nazi machine sought to rob their victims of all vestiges of their humanity and thereby justify their treatment of the camp victims. This in turn led to the horrible events that we all know so well. Levi, however, does not just aim to show us the horror of the... more info
A truly necessary book Philip Roth has described this as "one of the century's truly necessary books", and the adjective feels exactly right. It's not enjoyable, or uplifting, or brilliant, or sentimental, or entertaining, but you feel compelled to read it, and to tell everyone else about it. Previously, I thought I knew a little about the prison camps and the Nazi program for the extermination of the Jews, but Levi's dispassionate account of his world brings out a level of everyday detail that - incredibly - is almost mundane in... more info
Hard to recommend, hard to avoid recommending Where do you start with a book like this? It's brilliantly written, and compelling reading - for the quality of the narrative as much (more?) than the subject matter. But, of course, the subject matter makes it virtually unreadable. How much do you really want to know about the experience of drawing breath in one of the Auschwitz camps? How little imagination do you need to have, to need the monstrosity spelt out in all its tiny, obsessive detail? It appalled me to find myself turning the pages, unable to... more info
