The Periodic Table (book)
First edition
|
|
| Author | Primo Levi |
|---|---|
| Original title | Il sistema periodico |
| Translator | Raymond Rosenthal |
| Cover artist | M. C. Escher |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
| Publisher |
Einaudi (Italian) Schocken Books (English) |
|
Publication date
|
1975 |
|
Published in English
|
1984 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) and (Paperback) |
| Pages | 233 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 16468959 |
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.
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.
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.
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