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The National Interest
A Matter of Writing Life and Death
by Michael P. McDonald
Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002), 898 pp., $40.
Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 624 pp., £25.
. . . In different parts of the world, various communities are again being persecuted, tortured and ethnically cleansed. The ongoing reversion to mass murder and the ubiquitous use of hunger and imprisonment as political instruments mark a continuing crisis of culture and reason to which Levi’s testimony about the death camps remains relevant. But Levi’s books also speak to certain specific violations of human dignity that are to be found even in the peace and affluence of contemporary America and Europe. . . .
. . . To help to retain our humanity, to avoid a recrudescence of the brutalization of manners that occurred in civilized nations during the last century, and to prevent seemingly fixed moral thresholds from evaporating before our eyes, we can do no better than to read Primo Levi. His biographies, on the other hand, we can skip.