Books Primo Levi

Primo Levi, an Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor, has pulled together additional examples in his inventive and amusing book The Periodic Table. Here are his thoughts about zinc ... 

Curiously, for several years now, Primo Levi has been posthumously elevated by the media to the rank of first importance among witnesses of the Auschwitz gas chambers. He is the author of Se questo e un uomon The first part of the book is the longest and the most important it comprises 180 pages... 

Interestingly, the bottom-up approach to the construction of molecular level devices and machines was poetically anticipated by Primo Levi in his already-cited book The Monkey s Wrench [55] ... 

I greatly admire Primo Levi, and his suicide perplexes me. I suppose he was a typical survivor and felt guilty in surviving. The person who drew my attention to Primo Levi s book was Emilio Segre. The remark didn t upset me. 

In Fig. 1.3, we presented a tmncated version of the Periodic Table in which elements have been colour-coded into nine families — respectively the alkali metals (often known as the alkali earth metals), the alkaline earth metals, the transition metals, the other metals, the metalloids, the nonmetals, the halogens, the noble gases, and finally, with just lanthanum as its sole example, the rare earths. Now in Fig. 1.4, we present an idiosyncratic view of the Periodic Table, highlighting a few characteristic facets of a selected number of elements, and in what follows, we have tried to illustrate some of these. Those elements that have been dealt with above, or will be dealt with specifically in later chapters, and will not be discussed in any detail here. The presentation follows their order by group and by row in the periodic table. An equally idiosyncratic view of the Periodic Table can be found in the wonderful and memorable book by Primo Levi (Levi, 1985). 

Science is human and human beings are a muddle. In his book The Periodic Table, Primo Levi referred to chemistry as a mess compounded of stenches, explosions, and small futile mysteries. There too he distinguished two conflicting philosophical conclusions. The one he called the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail. The other he referred to as the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. So, he continued, take the solution of copper sulfate which is in the shelf of reagents, add a drop of it to your sulfuric acid, and you ll... 

Inevitably one must mention Primo Levi in the context of this chapter s topic. But I confess that I intend to say rather little about him, since I rather feel that to dwell on Levi would be to cheat on my aim here. He had a privileged perspective in that he was a chemist, whereas I want to look at how chemistry has impacted on writers who did not have that training, or indeed that specific focus in their oeuvre. But I do wish to point out that Levi s classic book The Periodic Table (published in Italian in 1975) grasps the essence of chemistry s allegories in a manner that is very much akin to the chemical philosophies of centuries earlier, where the transformations that are conducted in the chemical laboratory... 

But let s return to a modern use of metaphor, based upon the toxic element lead, and visit the book The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi, who used 21 elements as metaphors in 21 stories. For example ... 

Some of the most beautiful reflections on such negotiations were written by the ItaUan chemist and acclaimed writer Primo Levi in his book The Periodic Table... 

So it is with chemistry. There are two ways in to the beauty (and danger) of chemistry— I could call the first the smells, stinks, and colors way, and the second the molecular architecture way. I could also call one Oliver s way, referring to the way Oliver Sacks was attracted to the physicality of macroscopic matter transforming. Which he recoimts masterfully in his Uncle Tungsten, a contender (with Primo Levi s The Periodic Table) for the best introduction to chemistry ever written. And there is Sason s way, the delight in the macroscopic molecule, assembled and taken apart, that pervades every page of this book. I think one needs both, especially in our time. 

Part of the appeal of the periodic table derives from the individual nature of the elements and from their names. The chemist and concentration camp survivor Primo Levi began each chapter of his much-acclaimed book The Periodic Tabl ... 

Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, 1st American ed., Schocken Books, New York, 1984. 

Angier, C., The Double Bond. Primo Levi. A Biography (London, Penguin Books, 2003). 

Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. New York Schocken Books, 1984. 

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