Arrested Development

BOOKFORUM — DECEMBER/JANUARY 2008
The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
By Orlando Figes
Metropolitan Books, 740 pages, $35

Early in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s astonishing memoir, Hope Against Hope, she remembers the moment when she registered, for the first time, the full horror of life under Stalin. It was not, as one might assume, when she learned that [...]

Review of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz Report

BOOKFORUM — DECEMBER/JANUARY 2007
Auschwitz Report
Primo Levi with Leonardo De Benedetti, Translated by Judith Woolf
Verso 98 pages, $18
In the dark constellation of Holocaust witness, Primo Levi’s voice has always been thought singular. His memoir If This Is a Man, published only two years after the end of his year of slavery at the Monowitz concentration camp [...]