∎ Download If This Is a Man and The Truce Primo Levi Stuart Woolf Paul Bailey 9780349100135 Books

If This Is a Man and The Truce Primo Levi Stuart Woolf Paul Bailey 9780349100135 Books

Download As PDF : If This Is a Man and The Truce Primo Levi Stuart Woolf Paul Bailey 9780349100135 Books

If This Is a Man and The Truce Primo Levi Stuart Woolf Paul Bailey 9780349100135 Books

Lately I joined a book exchange and we were asked to buy our favorite book and send it to a stranger. I chose Primo Levi's "If This Is Man." This book has been one of my favorite books for well over a decade now. The material is very heavy but completely worth every second, even the ones that make you cry.

There are few books in life the legitimately change the way you look at the world or yourself but this is one of them. I have a background in WWII history so a great deal of the details were already known to me. What impacted me more was how the author wrote with true humanity and an absolute lack of apology. He presented what happened to him and others without trying to dramatize it and without holding back which is a difficult balance to achieve and maintain. An aspect that he addresses a lot is how the basics of what it is that makes us human continue to manifest even under the most inhumane circumstances.

If I were to recommend only one book to people, it would be this one. Even if you are not interested in in WWII history or are uncomfortable with the subject matter I suggest giving it a try anyway. The lessons this book has to offer stretch far beyond knowledge of one of the most atrocious acts in human history. As important as it is to learn about the devastation and cruelty of what happened during the Holocaust, and it is truly important in this day and age not to forget the depth humans can sink, this book also offers lessons into what unites us all and makes us human.


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If This Is a Man and The Truce Primo Levi Stuart Woolf Paul Bailey 9780349100135 Books Reviews

Sobering. How can one truly understand life and horror (if you can call it life) within the Nazi concentration and extermination camps without having experienced it? Read this along with Elie Wiesel's "Night" and "The Theory and Practice of Hell The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them" by Eugen Kogon a long time prisoner in Buchenwald. This book contains the text from "Survival in Auschwitz" (The English title for "If This is a Man") as well as his liberation and long return to Turin, Italy via the Soviet Union (The Truce).
I have long heard references to this work and am pleased to have finally engaged with it. I learnt a lot despite already knowing much from other extensive reading and study of the Holocaust. The immediacy and impact of the images and experiences were quite different and added dramatically to that of which I was aware It was incomparable. Jenny D.
A clear and matter of fact description of concentration camp survival, where cruelty, starvation and privation was the ordinary way of "life". It's a powerful testament to the ability of humans to survive the relentless inhuman treatment. It is an important history to tell by the few that survived. Life is stranger than fiction. Few people can imagine such a horror yet it happened to real people perpetrated by real people.
This is a book I had heard of over for over forty years but never read. I am really glad I have read it now as it is one of the best and most humane books I've read on this dark time in our collective history. It is one man's story told in such a way that there is no blame or wish for retribution and it is so much better for that. It shows what day to day life was really like for so many people who suffered in the concentration camps. It shows the pain and suffering but also the joys and simple humanity along the way. It is inspirational in its simple honesty and I highly recommend it.
Primo Levi who writes his experiences of the camp, and of the journey back to Turin, in a voice of a calm, scientific, logical witness with a great caution to avoid vengeance or emotionality, however with a keen conscience and intellect. (The Afterward is a great guide to understand the author's mindset in writing this book and what happened to some of the men in the book.) Not only does the book record the realities of day to day lives of the camp, but also presents interesting studies on human behaviors under extreme environments such as the camp in the face of imminent and random death, raises the philosophical question about what makes us bestial or human regardless. He lives through the demolition of a man and what remains of the man, and he takes the reader to the point of new understanding of the imperfect unhappiness beyond the familiar and banal concept of imperfect happiness. ""The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite......they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable." "We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last---the power to refuse our consent......we must walk erect....to remain alive, not to begin to die." In the Afterward, he states his determination to recognize in men, not in things helped him to endure, as he describes a kind Italian civilian, Lorenzo, "for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving...Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man." In The Truce, Levi describes the difficult journey home and to coming to terms with the guilt and shame as well as the complex emotions that come with the hope to return home--disappointment, expectancy, uncertainty, discomfort, nostalgia and boredom. The part where he passes through Munich is deeply thought provoking, searching for someone who knows, remembers and can reply to the sufferings of the people at the camp. He talks about how important it is to "know" if not 'understand" what happened because "conscience can be seduced and obscured " as evidenced by Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Lately I joined a book exchange and we were asked to buy our favorite book and send it to a stranger. I chose Primo Levi's "If This Is Man." This book has been one of my favorite books for well over a decade now. The material is very heavy but completely worth every second, even the ones that make you cry.

There are few books in life the legitimately change the way you look at the world or yourself but this is one of them. I have a background in WWII history so a great deal of the details were already known to me. What impacted me more was how the author wrote with true humanity and an absolute lack of apology. He presented what happened to him and others without trying to dramatize it and without holding back which is a difficult balance to achieve and maintain. An aspect that he addresses a lot is how the basics of what it is that makes us human continue to manifest even under the most inhumane circumstances.

If I were to recommend only one book to people, it would be this one. Even if you are not interested in in WWII history or are uncomfortable with the subject matter I suggest giving it a try anyway. The lessons this book has to offer stretch far beyond knowledge of one of the most atrocious acts in human history. As important as it is to learn about the devastation and cruelty of what happened during the Holocaust, and it is truly important in this day and age not to forget the depth humans can sink, this book also offers lessons into what unites us all and makes us human.