PERIODIC TABLE, THE(ISBN=9780805210415)

Collection of memoirs by Primo Levi, published in Italian as Il sistema periodico in 1975. Regarded as his masterwork, it is a cycle of 21 autobiographical stories, each named after and inspired by a chemical element. To Levi, a chemist as well as a writer, each element had an associative value--its properties symbolizing certain thoughts and triggering specific memories. In "Argon" he draws an analogy between the nonreactivity of this inert gas and the refusal of his Jewish ancestors to assimilate into the Gentile majority of their native Italian Piedmont. "Hydrogen" is an anecdote about his boyhood experiments with this explosive gas. "Vanadium" recounts his unexpected encounter with a former official of Auschwitz, where Levi was imprisoned during World War II. Attacking the fascist myth of racial purity in "Zinc," the author reveals his preference for the "boring metal" when it is in an active state of impurity. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew.
It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him.
The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that are capable of resisting and enduring in the face of tyranny.
From the Hardcover edition.

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. Levi is also the author of the forthcoming Modern Classics: MOMENTS OF REPRIEVE and IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

Argon
Hydrogen
Zinc
Iron
Potassium
Nickel
Lead
Mercury
Phosphorus
Gold
Cerium
Chromium
Sulfur
Titanium
Arsenic
Nitrogen
Tin
Uranium
Silver
Vanadium
Carbon

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