Primo Levi, author of The Periodic Table, a memoir with a chemical theme.

Primo Levi

Primo Levi was a chemist, an author, and an Italian Jew. I recently read one of his books, The Periodic Table, a memoir in which each chapter is named after an element. He starts with his boyhood in Turin, and progresses through his school years and into WWII (that's as far as I've gotten so far). Eventually he was sent to a concentration camp; he's written 2 books about those experiences.

The Periodic Table is a very interesting book. Skip the first chapter (Argon) or at least don't let it stop you from reading the rest of the book. The first chapter is an overly detailed description of his relatives and the local dialects used by Jews in Turin in the 1930's. Boring. But starting with the next chapter things get interesting. He majored in chemistry in both high school and college and, like Oliver Sachs about ten years later (see Uncle Tungsten - Google:Uncle+Tungsten ), had a number of 'exciting' incidents in the chem lab. As World War II began, his life became more stressful and dangerous - escape routes from Italy were basically cut off, and he was not of a disposition to make the effort to escape. So he was able to rely on the discretion and sometimes kindness of others, anti-fascists or those for whom fascism seemed merely silly, to avoid some of the worst excesses of the Italian racial laws.

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