The Search for Roots

The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology is a compilation of thirty pieces of prose and poetry selected by Italian-Jewish author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi as part of an abortive project by his original Italian publisher Einaudi to identify the texts which most influenced major Italian writers.

Contents

 * 1) "The Just Man Oppressed by Injustice": "The Book of Job", The Bible
 * 2) "A Man of No Account": Homer, New Coasts and Poseidon's Son, The Odyssey
 * 3) "Why are Animals Beautiful?": Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
 * 4) "To See Atoms": Sir William Bragg, Concerning the Nature of Things
 * 5) "The Pact with the Mammoths": Joseph-Henri Rosny, La Guerre du Feu
 * 6) "The Hobbies": Giuseppe Parini, "The Day"
 * 7) "A Deadly Nip": Carlo Porta, "Olter Desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee"
 * 8) "Dystopia": Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
 * 9) "A Testing Time": Joseph Conrad, "Youth"
 * 10) "The Words of the Father": Ludwig Gattermann, Laboratory Methods of Organic Chemistry
 * 11) "Better to Write of Laughter Than Tears": François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
 * 12) "A Different Way of Saying 'I'": Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
 * 13) "The Romance of Technology": Roger Vercel, Tug-Boat
 * 14) "The Dark Well of the Human Spirit": Herman Melville, Moby Dick
 * 15) "Survivors in the Sahara": Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
 * 16) "The Curious Merchant": Marco Polo, The Travels
 * 17) "The Poet-Researcher": Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe
 * 18) "The Jew on Horseback": Isaac Babel, Collected Stories
 * 19) "An Irrepressible Quibbler": Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories
 * 20) "Pity Hidden beneath Laughter": Giuseppe Belli, The Sonnets
 * 21) "Why We are Not Happy": Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
 * 22) "We are the Aliens": Fredric Brown, "Sentry"
 * 23) "The Measure of All Things": ASTM D 1382 - 55 T, American Society for Testing Materials
 * 24) "Urchin Death": Stefano D'Arrigo, Horcynus Orca
 * 25) "TV According to Leonardo": Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Enquiry into the Limits of the Possible
 * 26) "Before and after the Crime": T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral
 * 27) "Death Fugue": Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan
 * 28) "Tonie the Winterer": Mario Rigoni Stern, The Story of Tönle
 * 29) "Trying to Understand": Hermann Langbein, Menschen in Auschwitz
 * 30) "We are Alone": Kip S. Thorne, The Search for Black Holes
 * "Afterword": The Four Paths of Primo Levi by Italo Calvino