If This is a Man (The Folio Society)

234 pp. Introduction by Frederic Raphael. Etchings by Jane Joseph. Translated by Stuart Woolf. ...With the moral stamina and intellectual pose 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 ... 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. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. While his death was officially ruled a suicide, some evidence supports the possibility that the fall was accidental.