Primo Levi has emerged as one of the most incisive and humanly candid intellects among those writers who experienced the Holocaust and survived to tell about it. His classically concise, sober and lean style is reflective of a mind that insists on being guided by reason and civility. To express himself in a rational, clear and composed manner signified for Levi a moral victory over the Shoá and gave and additional dimension of validity to his own survival. Leviʼs insistence on the writer as witness and communicator, like the definition of the artist as builder of alternative worlds, retains some coherent vision of the social order and mandated relationship between history and art. In his finals years, his sense of despair and disillusion is...