I read this book as an undergrad in Provo. I remember after reading Survival in Auschwitz wanting to read everything I could find by Levi. I read this and wasn't initially wowed by it, but as time passed and I revisited the stories, my appreciation really grew. The book is structurally very clever, with several chapters named after various elements, and in each of the chapters Levi tells a story that centers around or involves that element in some essential way. The most humane chemistry book I have ever read (not that there's really much competition, but all the same). ( )

This book is partly memoir, partly fiction, with each chapter entitled for an element from the periodic table. The element may introduce a reminiscence, or be the subject of a short fantasy. The author earned his doctorate in chemistry, and earned his living as an industrial chemist, working in a number of different jobs. He finished his doctorate in Mussolini's Italy in about 1942. He joined the partisans when the Germans moved into Italy, but was captured, and, being a Jew, sent to Auschwitz. He identified himself as a chemist, and was put to work in a nearby synthetic rubber factory, narrowly avoiding the death march that ended the lives of most of the remaining survivors when the Russians moved in. He has two other books about that time of his life, and there is only a few bits of that history in this book. The writing was elegant, absorbing, and witty, and some of the early chapters on his relatives in the Piedmont were hilarious. I read this while on airplanes and travel with Joe to colleges. ( )

Liked how each chapter represented an element and the story within the chapter would relate to the element somehow. True stories of an Italian Jews experience during WW2 and how the Nazis used scientists like him. ( )

i got somewhat addicted to this book. I LOVE WHAT I DO IN LIFE (software engineer). but sometimes when it seems a little bit of routine breaking in i need some encouragement. and in this levi's work i find bundles of it. he loves his work, and he infects me with his love for work. work as a purpose in life. no shame in that.

Told by an Italian chemist before, during, and after World War II, each chapter of this remarkable tale bears the title of the name of an element from the periodic table of chemistry. And each chapter also explores a memory that relates in some way to that element. ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1061742.ht...

A very neat and thought-provoking series of autobiographical sketches (plus a couple of short fiction pieces), each based around one particular chemical element. Levi uses the metaphor to explore several aspects of his own life: growing up Jewish in Fascist Italy, being an industrial chemist, surviving Auschwitz. Fascinating and absorbing. ( )

The elements of Levi's stories are hardly the dignified and stodgy entities we know from chemistry class. They are more like temperamental children, exploding if mishandled or unexpectedly congealing into sulky solids if the presence of the merest whiff of impurity. In some of the stories, Levi is a detective searching for a contaminant which has spoiled a patch of paint or X-ray paper. In others, he is an alchemist intent on extracting riches from a pile of debris. We learn of his struggle to complete his degree and find work in Fascist Italy in the face of laws discriminating against Jews. Only one story refers directly to his time in Auschwitz when he is forced to assist a German chemist who has closed his eyes to the mass murder around him. These stories have the imaginative power of Borges, but remain rooted in the material world of a scientist who is at once a petty bureaucrat, a wizard of the elements and a man who must cope with the political turmoil around him. ( )

A magnificent book.

I just re-read this while on the train back from New York with my wife. but On the very last page, I found the note "York & 60th, Hospital Building, 8th Floor." This was the address of my wife's (then my girlfriend's) lab in New York 13 years ago. Evidently I first read it on the bus down to New York to see her right after college. (7.3.07) ( )

As varied as their elemental titles, these chapters/stories blend science and invention to create a work that is more than a memoir -- a stunning book. Unforgettable.
-- Eric

The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi, was surprisingly different in tone and structure to his very well know book, "If I was a Man' or the American title 'Survival in Auschwitz' - which I bought when I arrived in Canada, not realizing it was the same work. In 2006, "The Periodic Table' was named the best science book ever written. It fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

Levi was a writer, scientist, moralist, poet and philospher. He comes across his pages as a person unable to be categorized, struggling with past sufferings and ongoing torments. One of the most anguishing parts of the book is when he describes his communications with a German scientist he worked under in Auschwitz, and it is this tone that takes me back to his previous memoir. However, there is slightly more anger and a tone of impatience in this short story, that made me think that Levi the man has never found peace with his past. And possibly he should not, either. Indeed, he commits suicide several years after 'The Periodic Table' is written, apparently unable to come to terms with the world's forgetfulness of the Holocaust. Searching in bookstores for his two early memoirs, indeed they are impossible to find and buy, unless second-hand.

Born in Turin in 1919, Levi earned a doctorate in chemistry and spent most of his life as an industrial chemist, helping to formulate enamels and varnishes. In February 1944, Levi and the other 600 Jews at the prison camp in Fossoli were loaded on transports to Auschwitz. Five hundred of them — the old and sick, women and children — were gassed immediately on arrival. Of the remaining able-bodied men, about 20 survived until the end of the war.

The Periodic Table was published in 1975, and varies immensely from his memoirs. It cleverly fuses the different aspects of Levi's life - chemistry, memoir, ethics, with reflection on the Holocaust. It is almost poetic in parts, with a philosophical bent that marries together with his scientific knowledge beautifully. Levi descibes his work as a chemist, his struggle with matter and its relationship to his soul.

There are twenty one stories, based metaphorically on the elements of the Periodic Table, and chronologically ordered to reflect Levi's life — two early short stories are inserted at the point in Levi's life when they were written — but they are independent and don't pretend to be autobiographical.

++POSSIBLE SPOILER++

The first chapter is a heavier, wordier read that the rest of the book, and talks of the inertness of "Argon", reflecting on Levi's ancestors, whom he considers 'noble, inert and rare': the alien who migrated from Spain to the Piedmont without forming bonds with their fellow Italians.

Some of the titles, Lead, Mercury, Sulphur, head chapters of fantasy or near-fiction. Others stand both as metaphor and as strict truth.

In "Potassium" he tells of a fortunate chance of research work when the racial laws prohibited it. He learns the hard way that although potassium is 'almost' sodium in the periodic table, it won't substitute for it. 'One must distrust the almost-the-same, the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates and all patchwork. The difference can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switchpoints. The chemists trade consists in good part of being aware of those differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade.'

The Auschwitz story is represented only by one chapter, "Cerium". In this, prisoner 174517 having tried to keep alive by making fatty acids in the laboratory, and fritters out of sanitary cotton, steals three hard, colourless tasteless rods from a jar and identifies them as iron-cerium, the alloy from which lighter flints were made: he and another thinned them down and sold them, keeping alive for the two months until liberation.

"Potassium" and "Hydrogen" centre on experiments Levi did as a student, "Nickel" on work at a nickel mine, and "Phosphorus" on an improbable romance with a laboratory co-worker in wartime Milan.

"Vanadium" is about a post-war encounter with one of the German scientists encountered while working there as a slave. "Arsenic", "Nitrogen", and "Tin" are about adventures as a free-lance chemical consultant and "Chromium" and "Silver" are industrial detective stories, in which chemical problems are solved.

"Carbon" follows a carbon atom around the planet, as the final to his work and a kind of allegorical ending to fit the idea of a circle of life.

In the fourth chapter, entitled "Iron", he explains the philosophy of his science:

'... and Sandro was surprised when I tried to explain to him some of the ideas that at the time I was confusedly cultivating. That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in leceo: and come to think of it, it even rhymed! That if one looked for the bridge, the missing link, between the world of words and the world of things, one did not have to look far: it was there, in our Autenrieth, in our smoke-filled labs, and in our future trade.'pg 40.

When I read this paragraph, I was completely gob-smacked. Amazed, enthralled and totally engaged for the rest of the book. Primo Levi had again struck me as one of those incredibly intelligent, enquiring and good people that you aspire to meet and wish to emulate to some small degree, and he caught me up after this and swept me to the end of the book in very short order.

My favourite chapters were 'Phosporus', 'Cerium' and 'Chromium' and 'Vanadium' and I rushed back to re-read these three after finishing. In 'Cerium', talking about his great friend Alberto:

'He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it's a matter of launching it. ....Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them,: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.'
pg143.

In "Chromium", Levi gives his most poignant reason for writing:

"The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me: I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told its story, and I felt like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune. I was writing concise and bloody poems, telling the story at breakneck speed, either by talking to people or by writing it down, so much so that gradually a book was later born: by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint: one of those people who form a family and look to the future rather than the past."
pg 151

The saddest thing is that Levi could not fulfil his ongoing needs for purification, as he felt people had stopped listening. He died in spite of it all. ( )

It's a memoir of an Italian Jewish chemist organized into tales based on the elements from the Periodic Table. He says that,
'So it happens, ..., that every element says something to someone (something different to each) like the mountains valleys or beaches visited in youth.'

The stories start with Argon and the times before the Second World War, go through war experiences, the concentration camp, and finish with Carbon ('since carbon says everything to everyone'), and are each about one episode from the author's life. Some stories were very good, insightful and well written. Argon (the family history), Iron (getting stranded in the mountains with a friend), or Vanadium (the correspondence with the former supervisor in Auschwitz) will stay with me for a long time, but most will be gone and forgotten in no time.
( )

A masterpiece.Truely original,might be pretentios if other writers wrote it,but with the warmth and humanity of Levi's writing, is becomes a magnificent achievment. ( )

I feel an affinity to this book as I gained a degree in chemistry back in the seventies. Primo Levi is the only author I know who melds science and literature in this fashion to produce stunning, important literature. Each chapter is named after an element and the stories are incredibly physical and driven by the male working world. Levi's experiences in surviving Auschwitz are evident with the passion for life and creation found in these tales. ( )

When I read this book - which was admittedly over a decade ago - I was deeply moved by its orginality. Wonderful. ( )

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/primo.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Le... ( )

Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust.

From Publishers Weekly
This curious memoir by an Italian Jew who came of age under Mussolini is organized by the periodic table of the elementschapter titles range from Argon to Zinc. Levi portrays himself as a young, aspiring chemist eager to fathom nature's secrets. The sections describing his ordeal in a detention camp, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz, are the most vivid. PW called this an "odd, haunting book."

An extraordinary work in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and starting point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as a chemist and his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition.