Author | Primo Levi |
---|---|
Original title | Il sistema periodico |
Translator | Raymond Rosenthal |
Cover artist | M. C. Escher |
Country | Italy |
Language | Italian |
Genre | Short stories |
Publisher |
Einaudi (Italian) Schocken Books (English) |
Publication date | 1975 |
Published in English | 1984 |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 233 |
ISBN | 0-8052-3929-4 |
OCLC | 16468959 |
The Periodic Table ( Italian: Il sistema periodico) 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. [1]
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, [2] 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.
The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016. [5] The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.
Author | Primo Levi |
---|---|
Original title | Il sistema periodico |
Translator | Raymond Rosenthal |
Cover artist | M. C. Escher |
Country | Italy |
Language | Italian |
Genre | Short stories |
Publisher |
Einaudi (Italian) Schocken Books (English) |
Publication date | 1975 |
Published in English | 1984 |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 233 |
ISBN | 0-8052-3929-4 |
OCLC | 16468959 |
The Periodic Table ( Italian: Il sistema periodico) 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. [1]
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, [2] 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.
The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016. [5] The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.