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If This Is a Man / The Truce by: Primo Levi List Price: £9.99 City Travel Guides Price: £6.59 You Save: £3.40 (34%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 920 EAN: 9780349100135 ISBN: 0349100136 Label: Abacus Manufacturer: Abacus Number Of Pages: 400 Publication Date: January 01, 1991 Publisher: Abacus Studio: Abacus Sales Rank: 1662 Related Items:
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 Rating: - Indispensible - a necessary readIf 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 events, but understand them. Thus, amongst the debasement of life in the camps, we see how necessary it becomes to bathe with dirty water - not to clean yourself, but to regain fragments of your own humanity. This book is essential if we are ... Read More: Rating: - A truly necessary bookPhilip 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 its completeness. In his introduction to the book, Levi signs off almost regretfully, saying "It seems to me unecessary to add that none of the facts are invented". At first, you wonder why he should - however gently - remind ... Read More: Rating: - Hard to recommend, hard to avoid recommendingWhere 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 put it down without the expedient of falling asleep. It was like some twisted snuff porn on one level, as Levi led me through the minutiae of violence and death, like I was rubber-necking into the mangled driver's seat of a road fatality, and running ... Read More: Rating: - A must readBeautifully written on subjects only personally witnessed in a personal way with the clinical reporting of a professional chemist. If you read often or infrequently this is a must read. Read in conjunction with Auschwitz report. Rating: - 5 star books!!Primo Levi recounts his time in the concentration camp as someone trying make sense of what is happening around him, and of human nature. Unlike other books on the subject it did not make me want to cry about how unjust the world was it made me want to think about life and about human nature. His prose is just unbelievable - so lucid and stuning. His observations on human behaviour are so accurate. This is definitely the best book I am likely to read in a long time!! |
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