If This is Man and The Truce

Jan 14, 2025 4:59 AM

Author:Primo Levi

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. IF THIS IS A MAN describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. THE TRUCE covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame. By telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writing - work love, power, the nature of things, what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated, apprehensive.

Reviews

Shake Hands With The Devil is one of the saddest books I have ever read and one of the most heart-breaking eye-witness accounts.A kind of naive and painfully honest confession of the failure of an organisation, a meticulous description of one of the worst betrayals in the history of humanity.

—— Guardian

indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide

—— The Sunday Times

Although this is a deeply personal book, it is undoubtedly an important historical record of the UN's failure in Rwanda and an impassioned plea against the moral cowardice that allowed the genocide to happen.

—— The Independent

No historian of the past century has been more accessible

—— Niall Ferguson , Sunday Telegraph

An almost faultless masterpiece

—— Observer

Highly original and penetrating ... No one who has digested this enthralling work will ever be able to look at the period again in quite the same way

—— Sunday Telegraph

Keegan's power as a writer derives from the fact that he does not see himself merely as a chronicler of battles, but as a student of the human condition. It is the breadth of his grasp of civilisation, as well as of the soldier's art, that makes this book so formidable.

—— Max Hastings , Evening Standard

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