Rating: 
Summary: Toward a Deeper Understanding
Review: Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow said, regarding this book, "There is nothing superfluous here; everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderfully pure and beautifully translated."Since I read this book in the original Italian, I cannot attest to the beauty of the translation. However, I would agree with Bellow that the book is wonderfully pure and lacking in the superfluous. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi's fantasy regarding chemical elements and written in his elegant, spare style, is filled with images that animate the chemist's world. To a trained chemist, as Levi was, the molecular world is very real, and the its underlying events do not go unnoticed. This is the world that exists beneath the one we usually see; the world that gives matter its colors, tastes, smells, shapes and capacities. Levi's desire for a more complete understanding of the chemical world parallels his desire for a more complete understanding of the spiritual world of mankind. In this book, Levi tells us, in part, of his years as a teenager and of his experiences with another young man named Enrico. Both boys wanted to become chemists, but for very different reasons. Enrico thought that chemistry would be the key to a more secure life. Levi, however, looked at chemistry as a way to understand and make sense of the universe. He says, "Chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black evolutes torn by fiery flashes." He goes on to describe his burning desire to find the truths hidden in chemistry by telling us that he would have grabbed Proteus, himself, by the throat and forced him to speak, so great was his hunger. Levi's burning desire for a deeper understanding of the universe and all it contains is not new. The ancients, such as Aristotle, and later, Newton, also searched for the key to the mysteries of life. But Levi's desire was perhaps more pure, more essential. He writes, "Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves." Although chiefly a Holocaust memoir, the book is not without its lighter moments. In school, Levi had decided that chemistry alone could no longer fulfill his needs and he resolved to pursue physics. As an assistant, he was called upon to prepare pure dry benzene for an experiment by distilling the solvent over sodium. However, using potassium instead of sodium, Levi caused a laboratory fire. The quest for knowledge of the universe is ongoing. Levi, however, sadly found himself spurred on by the prejudices that only man can inflict on man.
Rating:
Summary: Toward a Deeper Understanding
Review: Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow said, regarding this book, "There is nothing superfluous here; everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderfully pure and beautifully translated." Since I read this book in the original Italian, I cannot attest to the beauty of the translation. However, I would agree with Bellow that the book is wonderfully pure and lacking in the superfluous. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi's fantasy regarding chemical elements and written in his elegant, spare style, is filled with images that animate the chemist's world. To a trained chemist, as Levi was, the molecular world is very real, and the its underlying events do not go unnoticed. This is the world that exists beneath the one we usually see; the world that gives matter its colors, tastes, smells, shapes and capacities. Levi's desire for a more complete understanding of the chemical world parallels his desire for a more complete understanding of the spiritual world of mankind. In this book, Levi tells us, in part, of his years as a teenager and of his experiences with another young man named Enrico. Both boys wanted to become chemists, but for very different reasons. Enrico thought that chemistry would be the key to a more secure life. Levi, however, looked at chemistry as a way to understand and make sense of the universe. He says, "Chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black evolutes torn by fiery flashes." He goes on to describe his burning desire to find the truths hidden in chemistry by telling us that he would have grabbed Proteus, himself, by the throat and forced him to speak, so great was his hunger. Levi's burning desire for a deeper understanding of the universe and all it contains is not new. The ancients, such as Aristotle, and later, Newton, also searched for the key to the mysteries of life. But Levi's desire was perhaps more pure, more essential. He writes, "Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves." Although chiefly a Holocaust memoir, the book is not without its lighter moments. In school, Levi had decided that chemistry alone could no longer fulfill his needs and he resolved to pursue physics. As an assistant, he was called upon to prepare pure dry benzene for an experiment by distilling the solvent over sodium. However, using potassium instead of sodium, Levi caused a laboratory fire. The quest for knowledge of the universe is ongoing. Levi, however, sadly found himself spurred on by the prejudices that only man can inflict on man.
Rating:
Summary: Remarkable Blend of Chemistry, Mussolini's Italy, and Memoir
Review: Primo Levi was a gifted writer that happened to practice chemistry. In these short memoirs he tells the story of a chemist, a chemist that is living in Mussolini's Italy, a chemist that is Jewish and survived Auschwitz. Levi has written of Auschwitz previously and only a single chapter in "The Periodic Table" directly discusses Auschwitz. To many readers the career of a chemist might seem as exciting as the career of an accountant or a tax attorney, essential to society, but better left to someone else. It hardly seems the subject for a remarkable literary work. Levi paints an intriguing portrait of a chemist, a detective unraveling the secrets of matter, a philosopher searching for meaning. We learn much about the kinds of problems that excite a chemist and how a chemist goes about searching for answers. But we learn more about Levi himself, about life in a Fascist state, and about human relationships in difficult situations. Primo Levi titled each chapter with the name of an element that either plays a role in that particular chapter or exhibits characteristics that are metaphorically descriptive of human relationships portrayed in that chapter. Most chapters revolve about an important biographical event. However, the first chapter, Argon, tells a rather quiet (inert) story of the unexciting Levi family history and it might be best to skip chapter one until later. Hydrogen, the second chapter, is more exciting, almost explosive. Zinc, Iron, Potassium, Nickel, and others follow. Three chapters - Lead, Mercury, and Carbon - are fictional. I was absolutely fascinated by all three. Levi is a great story teller. Lead should be read by students of history and Mercury likewise. Carbon should be mandatory reading for all students of chemistry and biology, probably for all humanities majors too. I have read "The Periodic Table" several times and it remains one of my favorite books. It melds sadness and humor, offers prose that is almost poetry, and uniquely blends history, chemistry, and memoir. It is widely recognized as an exceptional work of literature.
Rating:
Summary: From the Pyrex to the pen
Review: Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table" is a personal memoir of startling innovation, the curriculum vitae of an industrial chemist with the florid eloquence of a poet. Each of the twenty-one chapters is named after an element of the periodic table which relates directly or metaphorically to the topic Levi discusses in that chapter. For example, in "Hydrogen," he recalls an amusing electrolysis experiment he performed as a teenager with a budding interest in chemistry. To prove to a skeptical friend that a battery driving an electric current through a beaker of water produced a quantity of hydrogen gas, he holds a match to the opening of a glass jar filled with this premier element, exploding and shattering it in an inadvertently symbolic demonstration of the Big Bang.
"The Periodic Table" is not an autobiography because it intermixes other types of narratives with anecdotes from Levi's uncommonly interesting life. He was raised in the Jewish community of the Piedmont region in northwest Italy during the reign of Mussolini: "noble, inert, and rare," in the chapter called "Argon," is how he describes his Spanish-bred ancestors who never quite assimilated Italian gentile customs. His education was conducted under the ominous shadow of Hitler's conquest of Europe, and by the time he received his doctorate in 1941, "the world was racing to catastrophe." Despite civil laws that tried to separate Jews from gentile society, he was offered a series of professional jobs in a variety of analytical capacities.
His career was interrupted--this is an understatement--by imprisonment at Auschwitz, where he and a friend working in a laboratory came across sticks of cerium which they tried to turn into flint for the sake of bartering goods. Many years later, while investigating a defective resin for a varnish manufacturer, Levi had an opportunity to correspond with a German man named Muller whom he had known as a civilian inspector at the laboratory and confront him with questions about the atrocities that were condoned.
After the war, Levi's work as a consultant brought him some intriguing cases. A cobbler came to him one day with a parcel of sugar, a gift from a rival cobbler, and asked him to inspect it for poison. A cosmetics manufacturer hired him to find out why his lipstick was running; here we are fed Levi's opinion that a red dye called alloxan, whose molecule comprises two nitrogen, two hydrogen, four carbon, and four oxygen atoms, has a "pretty structure." Indeed, it's difficult to deny the neatness of its symmetry (Levi shows us a diagram), for such symmetry usually indicates a durability analogous to that of sturdily designed engineering structures.
One of the two "external" narratives takes place in the Bronze Age and is told by a sage named Rodmund from barbarian lands of the north who travels the world searching for lead with which to craft useful items; he is a pioneering metallurgist. Mercury is the subject of another, in which an English sailor discovers a vein of quicksilver under the volcano which forms the small desolate island on which he lives. These two chapters enter the realm of imaginative fiction and are like the irresistible icing on an already rich cake.
Levi writes about chemistry and the techniques of chemical analysis with professional assurance but also with the lucid language of a novelist eager to tell a fascinating story. Non-chemists need not be intimidated by the subject matter because Levi is the most welcoming of writers, willing to share his knowledge but never pedantic and, surprisingly, never pretentious in his literary aspirations; he is as much at home with the pen as he is with the Pyrex.
Rating:
Summary: Primo Levi's way out book
Review: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi is quite a fascinating book. Although the first chapter is slow (as pointed out in other reviews) the other chapters are pretty interesting. Although only one chapter directly relates to Auschwitz there is another about Primo's involvement with the partisans in Italy (including the bit about the gun he doesn't know how to use), and a very interesting chapter called Vanadium which is the second last chapter. This chapter is based on Primo's dealings with a German chemist (Dr Muller) in 1967. Dr Muller was a head of the Buna Rubber plant at Auschwitz where Primo worked. Basically Primo has business dealings with this person as well as personal correspondence although it's not as insightful as you might think because by Primo's own admission Dr Muller does not make a perfect protagonist because he was a civilian (business chief of Buna which was part of IG Farben I believe) and not a member of the SS, and therefore Primo realises that he won't get answers to questions like "Why Auschwitz?" (Although Primo corresponding with one of the butchers of Auschwitz could be a bit too weird). Nonetheless Primo's dealings with this person are very complex/interesting/multilayered/etc.
The tale about the centuries long journey of a carbon atom from being part of limestone to being part of Primo's brain is pretty way out too.
Rating:
Summary: amazing set of stories
Review: This book is a series of stories, each with an element from the periodic table as its theme. Many of the stories are from the autho's life, but a few are fictional. All are amazing. This book is not about the holocaust, it's not about the author's life as a partisan, it's a story about people and life and love and everything that makes people human. It's amazing that an author who has been through so many extraordinary things can write about his life in such a way that the rest of us can relate COMPLETELY to his story. This is simply an AMAZING book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Approach
Review: This book tells parts of the life story of Primo Levi, author, chemist, and Auschwitz survivor. Levi came of age in Fascist Italy and graduated university with a degree in chemistry just as World War II started tearing apart his world. Caught by German soldiers in a Partisan camp, he was shipped off to the Auschwitz death camp as a Jew. He survived the camp thanks to his chemistry skills, which secured him a job in a rubber factory near the camp. When he returned to Italy following liberation, he resumed work as a chemist, but he also took up writing as a means to communicate the experiences he had been through. Over the years, he published a number of books about Auschwitz, as well as books of poetry and stories. In this book, he records his memoirs as a chemist, with each chapter dedicated to an individual element.
The chapters are quite varied in topic and approach. At least two of the chapters are fanciful works of fiction, short stories that he wrote as a young man. The book begins with a chapter on the Noble gases, in which he compares his ancestors, now just memories, to inert gases such as argon. Other chapters early in the book are also based on comparisons between character traits of favorite people and chemical elements. The later chapters, however, are centered around stories or episodes in his life that featured substantive examples of one of the chemical elements. Some of the stories are quite amusing, others interesting in the historical perspective they provide of conditions of post-war Italy, and some, those describing the Nazi occupation and the concentration camp are disturbing. The stories are written as stand-alone entities, rather than fitting smoothly together as a coherent whole. Nevertheless, they are they are organized in strictly chronological order so that the reader can piece together the main events of Levi's life.
Rating:
Summary: Why only five stars?
Review: This book, like all truly great books, can be viewed in many ways. A possible, rewarding one is to view it as the story of an education. Each chapter, named after the periodic table of the elements, tells about the acquisition of an important piece of the mosaic that was Primo Levi.There is the discovery of the "essential language" of science, as opposed to the void rethoric of fascism, the discovery of courage, in the chapter named "Iron", of rigor, in the "potassium". But this is not a didactical book. This is a series of wonderful tales, of exquisite poetry and of life, true life. I didn't read more than five books comparable to this one.
Rating:
Summary: Symbolism: allegories and elements
Review: This is the first book by Primo Levi that I've read. The man was a brilliant author. "The Periodic Table" cleverly takes the elements that are part of our everyday lives and uses each to illustrate a story, most of which are his view point of 1940s Italy, before or after he was sent to Auschwitz. (Very little of this book has to do with the actual death camp, though its impressions are evident.) Levi, a chemist, tells autobiographical tales of his desire to make people see in the logical way that chemists see the world. The way that Levi weaves words might be more expected from a poet than from a scientist. Above all, however, Levi was an observer of both elements and of human nature. I'm only sorry that I discovered him after he died; I might have written to tell him how much I enjoyed his book. My mother, a scientist, is emotionally unable to read any more books about the Holocaust; but as this book doesn't talk about the horrors of the camps but about the era, why, I think I'll lend it to her. (amazon.com wishlist purchase)
Rating:
Summary: My book club chose it too!
Review: This was one of the ones that separated the men from the boys (so to speak)-- everyone thought the first chapter was slow, but the REAL readers kept going and those people loved it. The lame readers complained it was boring and then, guess what, it turned out that NONE of them had gotten beyond chapter 1! Well, I am not a great writer myself, but I do love well-written, gripping stories, and Periodic Table is all of that. I cried more than once, I savored many chapters and I have this book with a few others on a small shelf next to my bed so that I can read parts of it over and over again. Wonderful, special book!
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