Angier, Carole — The double bond. Primo Levi, a biography

Viking, 2002 Hardcover, with dust jacket. 898 pages. Text in English. As new. An important writer to emerge from the death camps, Levi spent 65 of his 67 years in Turin, Italy, where he worked as a chemist by day & wrote at night in a study, his childhood bedroom. Thanks to memoirs--“Survival in Auschwitz”, “The Reawakening” & “The Periodic Table”--he became known as a moral man who'd transmuted the agonies of persecution into understanding. He died in 1987, apparently having thrown himself into the stairwell of the house in which he'd been born. Angier spent a decade writing this meticulously researched biography, which illuminates the design of his interior how he lived as a man divided, not only between chemistry & writing but between hope & despair, & how the duty to testify released him to communicate.