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., [pounds sterling]25.
PRIMO LEVI (1919-87) was a largely autobiographical writer who, in addition to being a chemist, led a third career as a public witness to the Nazi atrocities at Auschwitz. The facts of his life, much like his prose, are simple and straightforward.
Levi was born in Turin on July 31, 1919 and, ...