The Periodic Table Introduction by Neal Ascherson

Name: The Periodic Table Introduction by Neal Ascherson
Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
Author: Primo Levi
ISBN: 9780679444633

by Primo Levi

4.4

(5 ratings)

278 pages1996Knopf Doubleday Publishing GroupISBN 9780679444633

Biography Memoir History

About this book

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.

Publication Details

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1996
Pages: 278
ISBN: 9780679444633
Language: en

About Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi (Turin, 31 July 1919- 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. He graduated in Chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941 and two years later joined the anti-fascist resistance. He was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he worked as a slave in an industrial plant. After the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945 and after an odyssey through several Eastern European countries, he returned to Turin and published his first account of the extermination camps, *Se questo è un uomo* (*If This Is a Man* / US: *The Reawakening*). His later biographical writings *La tregua* (*The Truce*, 1963) and *I sommersi e i salvati* (*The Drowned and the Saved*, 1986) are reflections on the experience of horror. His other works include *Il sistema periodico* (*The Periodic Table*), *Se non ora, quando?* (*If Not Now, When?*), *Storie naturali* (as Damiano Malabaila), *La chiave a stella* (*The Wrench*, 1978), *Lilit e altri racconti* (1978), *La ricerca delle radici* (*The Search for Roots*, 1981), and *L' ultimo Natale di guerra* (1984).