The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table is by Primo Levi, a chemist and one of the few thousand Italian Jews who were not successfully hidden during World War II. If you are curious about the pre-war culture of the Italkim (Italian Jews), this book is a window into a beautifully rendered lost world.

Primo Levi was ultimately imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he was sort of adopted by an illiterate Italian peasant who was swept up in the forced labor sweeps. The two of them were liberated and walked back to Italy together after the war.

What makes this book extraordinary is the way… show more.

Chemistry saves our lives every second of every day without us usually noticing it. Primo Levi’s personal history with chemistry perhaps saved him from the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

This extraordinary book is a series of snapshots from Levi’s life each linked to a different element. I would recommend reading anything Primo Levi has written, The Periodic Table is just the best place to start.

Rooted in autobiography, Levi’s exquisite collection of interlinked stories teases out the relationship between the human and mineral worlds.

Our idioms habitually position stone as the antithesis to life – we might describe a corpse as ‘stone dead’ or a machinelike bureaucrat as ‘stone hearted’.

Levi instead looks to a symbiotic relationship, in which the raw crags of the Alps teach fortitude, access to rare minerals provide a military advantage, and the ability to read the secrets written in stone offers a route to riches.

In The Periodic Table, exploitation of the elements always comes at a cost –… show more.

A bona fide classic of scientific memoir and short stories, Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table has been considered the gold standard of science writing since it was published. Levi writes about different events in his life, linking them with a different elements on the periodic table. There are many great chapters in his book, but it can be a tough read at times: Levi was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where his skills as a chemist saved him from certain death in the gas chambers at the hands of the Nazis.