"Primo Levi is one of the clearest and most hopeful writers we have. Starting with his great Auschwitz meditation, If This is a Man, he moved always from darkness to light, from suffering to understanding." "But beneath his rational surface was a different world, which he hid from himself and from others all his life, and allowed to emerge only occasionally in poems and stories.".

"These two levels of Levi are mirrored in the two levels of this extraordinary biography. On the first, we meet the people and places that shaped him: his troubled family; Turin, the severe and melancholy city he loved; his small, profoundly integrated Jewish community."--BOOK JACKET.