Indispensible - a necessary read - Rated 
If 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 to understand why the holocaust happened so easily and through it we can piece together how to prevent it happening again. Or at least understand the processes through which a society allows itself to sleepwalk into such nightmares. The reader walks away with nothing but sheer admiration for Levi and his abililty to continue to analyse his experiences despite the brutality of what he had to endure. It is an admiration that will be tinged with sadness when you learn of his eventual fate.
A truly necessary book - Rated
Philip 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 his reader of this, but then you're plunged into a world of such unbelievable horror that your only hope of relief would be that it wasn't all true. There are all kinds of ways in which he illustrates what it's like to live in a place that's so unrelentingly dedicated to your humiliation and destruction but, for me, one of the most memorable moments came when he was to be interviewed by one of the chemists in the rubber factory attached to the camp (in a withering aside that highlights yet another aspect of the total waste of human life, he also points out that - in spite of all the slave labour, all the prisoners who were worked to death by the Germans in the factory - it never actually produced anything).
He describes how the man looked at him "as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds". It's almost impossible to understand the depths of inhumanity that the Nazis plumbed, but Levi does that here, and reaches across the page to remind us of the perils and joys of the human condition.
Hard to recommend, hard to avoid recommending - Rated
Where 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 my fingers through the spilled brains. Too much; all too much. Yet the book is an utterly compelling discussion of what defines 'man'; where the boundaries lie; what morality is; what language is; what judgement is. Like a single, extended essay on the big questions. Levi does not judge, he observes, with withering clarity, and leaves the reader to pick up the pieces. Along with All Quiet on the Western Front and one or two others, it's one of those books I felt immediately that I should go on to study in depth, while knowing that I will struggle ever to read so much as a line of it again. Levi observes that the experience of Auschwitz was like taking part in some social and psychological experiment of the most monstrous and preposterous scale, that only the most insane combination of events and people could have facilitated. Reading this book felt a lot like being allowed to peep into a world of unique atrocity; to share the thoughts of someone who had not only touched the depths, but had spent months grovelling around on the bottom. It felt both a privilege and a kind of outrage; shaming, emptying, and stupidly enlightening, in a way I didn't want to be enlightened. Am I in any way improved for having read it? Or scarred by the experience, in my own tiny way? I have no idea yet. Read it at your peril, but it is a stunning piece of writing and a terrible witness.
A must read - Rated
Beautifully 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.
5 star books!! - Rated
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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