Rating: 
Summary: I'd give it 6 stars if I could.
Review: When I was 14, my high school chemistry teacher gave my class a writing assignment, which really pissed us off. We were in a chemistry class, why did Mr. Ellison expect us to write a short story? It wasn't actually an entire story: the first half was already written for us. It was about the 'adventures' of one atom of carbon. I felt like I was reading a book for small children on molecular chemistry because the writing style was simple, with no extra flourishes and long, scientific phrases. How demeaning to 14 year old me! In any case, I went home and wrote a completely uninspired ending to the carbon-atom fairy tale. If I remember correctly, the rest of the class did the same thing. Some were better than others, but none of them even began to come close to the original ending.Mr. Ellison took our mediocre stories and, in a bargain where we definately got the better deal, gave us the end of Primo Levi's Carbon, the last chapter of The Periodic Table. Nothing had prepared me for it. That simple style that I had so despised the night before was in fact the work of a writer who had stripped off all of those unnecessary phrases that I had been looking for, who had left nothing but the unadorned truth. Struck by this, I went out and bought the book. It consists of 21 chapters, each of which have an element of the periodic table as their themes. But in truth each chapter/story is based on one idea which is explored. Some stories are pure fiction, some are remembrances, and some are meditations. They range from family gatherings to amusing teenage chemistry mistakes to the threads that bind us all together. Levi was not only a gifted chemist and a gifted writer, but someone who had that rare talent of opening his personal philosphies to the reader, and you can't help but feel that you've gotten to know him by the end of the book, which certainly makes the read worth it.
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