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  • Published: 27 October 1995
  • ISBN: 9781857152180
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

The Periodic Table




'So it happens, therefore, that every element says something to someone'

An extraordinary kind of autobiography in which each of the 21 chapters takes its title and its starting-point from one of the elements in the periodic table. Mingling fact and fiction, science and personal record, history and anecdote, Levi uses his training as an industrial chemist and the terrible years he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz to illuminate the human condition. Yet this exquisitely lucid text is also humourous and even witty in a way possible only to one who has looked into the abyss.

  • Published: 27 October 1995
  • ISBN: 9781857152180
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 280
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Other books in the series

About the author

Primo Levi

Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919. The son of an educated middle-class Jewish family, he graduated with a degree in chemistry and found a job as a research chemist in Milan. In December 1943, he was arrested as part of the anti-fascist resistance and deported to Auschwitz. After the war, Levi resumed his career as a chemist, retiring only in 1975.

His graphic account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, was published in 1947 and he went on to write many other books, including If Not Now, When? and The Periodic Table, emerging not only as one of the most profound and haunting commentators on the Holocaust, but as a great writer on many twentieth-century themes. In 1987, Primo Levi died in a fall that is widely believed to have been suicide.

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