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The Periodic Table

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THE PERIODIC TABLE
Primo Levi
Translated by Raymond Rosenthall
This book is not, as the title might suggest, a chemistry textbook. It is in fact a collection of short stories, many of them autobiographical, though some stories of pure imagination are included. The episodes are linked historically and by the fact that the title of each is the same of one of the chemical elements. Some feature in each story illustrates or resembles the chosen elements properties and the search for such collections is part of the fascination of this unusual book.
The purpose of this review is to bring this book to the attention of any science teachers (particularly chemists) who have not come across it before. It is the most enjoyable book I have read for some time and I would like to share its chemical attractions with others who would appreciate them.
Levi manages in his writing to form a bridge between his experiences as a chemist and as a human being in a similar fashion to the way C. P. Snow's books tended to bridge "the two cultures". Primo Levi was an Italian of Jewish origin who made chemistry his profession. In the latter part of the Second World War he was incarcerated in Auschwitz before being liberated by the advancing Soviet forces. He worked again in various posts in Italy as an analytical chemist, but also wrote a number of autobiographical works of different types, his main theme being reconciliation after the horrors of the concentration camps.
The Periodic Table was first published in Italian in 1975 and translated into English in 1984. It received enthusiastic reviews for its easy combination of literary and scientific views of life and was praised as "a beautiful gem of a book" (The New Leader, 26 November 1984), "a work of healing, even buoyant imagination" (New York Times Book Review, 23 December 1984) and "one of the most intelligent books to have come along in years" (Washington Post, 30 December 1984).
Each of the reviewers above has his or her own favorite stories. Particularly praised are Vanadium and Carbon. In Vanadium, Levi investigates the chemistry of the raw materials in a varnish factory. He discovers from an error in the way the raw materials arc described by the chemist in charge of their export from Germany that this man was his overseer in the concentration camp during the war. The exchange of letters between the two men indicates the transitory and variable values of the German chemist - perhaps the easy colorful changes of valency of vanadium explain the title. In Carbon, Levi imagines an atom of carbon released by heating limestone and the many transformations it undergoes. Eventually embedded within his brain, it helps to make the decision to form the final full-stop of the story. This story, and perhaps others, could be used on an appropriate occasion to stimulate children's imaginative writing in science classes.
My own favorite story, Chromium, is also set in the varnish factory and is also concerned with the analysis of the raw materials. An impurity in these materials prevents the varnish from drying when used. Levi, by clever analysis solves the chemical problem (which takes one back to the systematic quantitative analysis many of an older generation will have done at school. The twist in the story is that he learns a long while later that the ingenious solution he found for this particular batch of varnish is still being used many years later when the impurity is no longer present in the starting materials. No one can understand the unusual formula for the varnish yet they still go on making it the same way.
I thoroughly recommend this book. It provokes thought, yet helps to reconcile the most refractory of differences.
W. P. Palmer
Origially published in The Australian Science Teachers Journal, May 1988, Volume 34. No.1, pp.91-92