Author | Primo Levi |
---|---|
Original title | Il sistema periodico |
Translator | Raymond Rosenthal |
Cover artist | M. C. Escher |
Country | Italy |
Language | Italian |
Genre | Short stories |
Publisher | Einaudi (Italian) Schocken Books (English) |
Publication date | 1975 |
Published in English | 1984 |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 233 |
ISBN | 0-8052-3929-4 |
OCLC | 16468959 |
The Periodic Table (Italian : Il sistema periodico) is a 1975 short story collection by Primo Levi, named after the periodic table in chemistry. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever. [1]
The stories are autobiographical episodes based on the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime in Italy and afterwards. They include various themes that follow 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, [2] 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.
Each of the twenty-one stories in the book bears the name of a chemical element as its title and has a connection to the element in some way.
The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016. [5] The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.
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A chemist is a graduated scientist trained in the study of chemistry, or an officially enrolled student in the relevant field. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe the properties they study in terms of quantities, with detail on the level of molecules and their component atoms. Chemists carefully measure substance proportions, chemical reaction rates, and other chemical properties. In Commonwealth English, pharmacists are often called chemists.
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Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element as it played a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
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