In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Berel Lang's biography shines new light on Levi's role as a major intellectual and literary figure - an important Holocaust writer and witness but also an innovative moral thinker in whom his two roles as chemist and writer converged , providing the 'matter' of his life.