8.4 /10 1 Votes8.4
Original title Il sistema periodico Cover artist M. C. Escher Originally published 1975 Page count 233 | 4.2/5 Country Italy Publication date 1975 Genre Biography Awards Best science book ever | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar Primo Levi books, Biographies |
The Periodic Table (Italian: Il Sistema Periodico) is a collection of short stories by Primo Levi, published in 1975, named after the periodic table in chemistry. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever.
Contents
Content
The stories are autobiographical episodes of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime and afterwards. They include various themes following a chronological sequence: his ancestry, his study of chemistry and practising the profession in wartime Italy, a pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time, and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan, his arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, and internment in the Fossoli di Carpi and Auschwitz camps, and postwar life as an industrial chemist. Every story, 21 in total, has the name of a chemical element and is connected to it in some way.
Chapters
- "Argon" – infancy of the author, the community of Piedmontese Jews and their language
- "Hydrogen" – two children experiment with electrolysis
- "Zinc" – laboratory experiments in a university
- "Iron" – the adolescence of the author, between the racial laws and the Alps
- "Potassium" – an experience in the laboratory with unexpected results
- "Nickel" – in the chemical laboratories of a mine
- "Lead" – the narrative of a primitive metallurgist (fiction)
- "Mercury" – a tale of the populating of a remote and desolate island (fiction)
- "Phosphorus" – an experience from a job in the chemical industry
- "Gold" – a story of imprisonment
- "Cerium" – survival in the Lager
- "Chromium" – the recovery of livered varnishes
- "Sulfur" – an experience from a job in the chemical industry (apparently fiction)
- "Titanium" – a scene of daily life (apparently fiction)
- "Arsenic" – consultation about a sugar sample
- "Nitrogen" – trying to manufacture cosmetics by scratching the floor of a hen-house
- "Tin" – a domestic chemical laboratory
- "Uranium" – consultation about a piece of metal
- "Silver" – the story of some unsuitable photographic plates
- "Vanadium" – finding a German chemist after the war
- "Carbon" – the history of a carbon atom
Adaptions
The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016. The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.