The Periodic Table (short story collection)  

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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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The Periodic Table (Template:Lang-it) 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.

Contents

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Content

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, 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.

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Chapters

  1. "Argon" – The author's childhood, the community of Piedmontese Jews and their language
  2. "Hydrogen" – Two children experiment with electrolysis
  3. "Zinc" – Laboratory experiments in a university
  4. "Iron" – The author's adolescence, between the racial laws and the Alps
  5. "Potassium" – An experience in the laboratory with unexpected results
  6. "Nickel" – Inside the chemical laboratories of a mine
  7. "Lead" – The narrative of a primitive metallurgist (fiction)
  8. "Mercury" – A tale of populating a remote and desolate island (fiction)
  9. "Phosphorus" – An experience on a job in the chemical industry
  10. "Gold" – A story of imprisonment
  11. "Cerium" – Survival in the Lager
  12. "Chromium" – The recovery of livered varnishes
  13. "Sulfur" – An experience on a job in the chemical industry (apparently fiction)
  14. "Titanium" – A scene of daily life (apparently fiction)
  15. "Arsenic" – Consultation about a sugar sample
  16. "Nitrogen" – Trying to manufacture cosmetics by scratching the floor of a hen-house
  17. "Tin" – A domestic chemical laboratory
  18. "Uranium" – Consultation about a piece of metal
  19. "Silver" – The story of some unsuitable photographic plates
  20. "Vanadium" – Finding a German chemist after the war
  21. "Carbon" – The history of a carbon atom
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Bibliography

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Adaptations

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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