At the Mind's Limits

Book excerpt: This searing memoir of the author’s concentration camp experience “is the autobiography of an extraordinarily acute conscience” (Newsweek). “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.” At the Mind’s Limits is the story of one man’s incredible struggle to understand the reality of horror. In five autobiographical essays, Amery describes his survival—mental, moral, and physical—through the enormity of the Holocaust. Above all, this masterful record of introspection tells of a young Viennese intellectual’s fervent vision of human nature and the betrayal of that vision. “These are pages that one reads with almost physical pain . . . all the way to its stoic conclusion.” —Primo Levi “The testimony of a profoundly serious man. . . . In its every turn and crease, it bears the marks of the true.” —Irving Howe, The New Republic