Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
Published: June 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 277
ISBN-13: 9780826213389
Subjects: Biography: general; European history: Second World War; Novels, other prose & writers: from c 1900 -; Political science & theory; The Holocaust; Postwar period, 1945 to c 2000; Second World War, 1939-1945; Jewish Holocaust; Political Philosophy; Philosophy; History - General History; Italian; History: American; Poland; Historical - Holocaust; Holocaust; Political; 20th century; Authors, Italian; Biography; History; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Italy; Levi, Primo; Political and social views; Politics and culture
Description: "At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz.

He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.".

"In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life," recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered?

Levi used this question to develop a philosophy positing that although man is no match for life, he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life."--BOOK JACKET.