If This Is A Man/The Truce
Book description
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…
Why read it?
4 authors picked If This Is A Man/The Truce as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
One of the many questions I asked about the Holocaust is: how a normative person could survive in Auschwitz? Levi provides some ideas.
Levi survived because of a few reasons. Unlike many people who gave up, he wanted to survive. He learned the keys to survival in an impossible place. He quickly learned basic German so he could understand the commands and many rules. He was smart and innovative. He was willing to take calculated risks. He understood that in the Auschwitz planet, he could not maintain ALL the norms he had as a free person. Some compromises with his…
This book has been described as one of the century’s truly necessary books.
If you are interested in holocaust literature, then this is a starting point. It's biographical writing at its best. No stone is left unturned in the writer’s account of his time spent in a concentration camp. A story of survival, this book is humanly honest in the portrayal of the unthinkable.
Reading this book for the first time was an experience not to be repeated. It is an essential read for everyone.
From S.J.'s list on stories of human adventures written in a captivating style.
This I think is one of the most important first-hand accounts of prisoner life at Auschwitz. It is a quiet, yet determined narrative that makes you feel as though you were there with Levi; experiencing the horrors, finding friends with other inmates, and understanding the true horror that awaited so many in Poland during WWII. If you want to really understand what it was like for camp inmates, this is the book to read.
From Carly's list on WWII that shed light on Polish history.
If you love If This Is A Man/The Truce...
Tap Dancing on Everest
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up…
Another book I keep returning to is If This Is a Man. Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, has written a matter-of-fact masterpiece, poetic yet never sentimental, about his year as a slave in the Monowitz/Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. It´s a low-key book but vibrant book about being a human surrounded by inhumanity.
From Elisabeth's list on memory and oblivion.
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