The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. New York. 1984. Schocken Books. 0805239294. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. 233 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Clarke.
DESCRIPTION - Primo Levi is justly regarded in his native Italy as one of its leading men of letters. A chemist by profession, in this book he writes about incidents of his life in which one or another of the elements of the periodic table figured in such a way as to become a personal preoccupation. For example, vanadium: Levi was a chemist for an Italian company that imported vanadium from Germany to use in its varnish. On one occasion the shipment from the German supplier was of such a character that the batch of varnish with which it was mixed never dried. Levi wrote to his opposite number, the chemist in the German firm. After much correspondence, that person admitted that the vanadium supplied had not been up to sample, paid Levi's claim, and shipped the proper chemical. But the suspicion had been growing in Levi's mind that the man with whom he was corresponding had been the chief of a laboratory m Auschwitz in which he himself had worked as a starved and abused prisoner. What that recognition meant-for both men-and what happened thereafter was an ironic working out of an infamy decades old but not ended. PRIMO LEVI is the author of two classic memoirs of the experience of the concentration camps, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ and THE RE-AWAKENING.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.
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