Long before writing such masterpieces as The Periodic Table, Primo Levi (1919-87) had already developed an intelligent and poised writing style as a means of chronicling the horrors of the Holocaust. Collected here is his first book, If This Is a Man (1947), in which he describes his work in the Italian resistance, his arrest, and imprisonment at Auschwitz. Here too is the 1963 sequel, The Truce, a powerful account of Levi's liberation from the camp, and his remarkably roundabout return home to Turin—by train, horse-cart, and on foot—through Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus.