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The Periodic Table (Essential Penguin) by: Primo Levi List Price: £8.99 City Travel Guides Price: £6.99 You Save: £2.00 (22%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 808 EAN: 9780140296617 ISBN: 0140296611 Label: Penguin Books Ltd Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd Number Of Pages: 208 Publication Date: February 22, 2001 Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd Studio: Penguin Books Ltd Sales Rank: 184816 Related Items:
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Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk Review: Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Taking the knowledge he gained from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust. Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Carphone Warehouse Book Club's favorite read in 2007The unusual form of the book, each chapter relating to an element of the periodic table (not every element is included), to tell the tale of a chemist's life is highly effective. The content reinforces the form and the form the content to give a really high quality novel. This was our group's favorite book by a modest lead over Lolita and The Master and Margarita. It is beautiful and moving and much more enjoyable than his good but harrowing Auschwitz tales. Please do not be put off by the slow start - Argon is a very thin, rare gas and this chapter is one of the least engaging perhaps for that reason. Iron was most people's favorite element. Rating: - Autobiographical Stories, Beautifully TranslatedI saw a negative review here and I want to speak in this book's defence. Not that the great Primo Levi should need me, but The Periodic Table is one of the books I have most enjoyed reading in the past couple of years and so I don't want people to get the wrong impression of what it is. For most of his working life Levi was a professional chemist, who also wrote on the side. Almost every chapter is a story from his remarkable life (two chapters are fiction and the remainder as with many or most writers has some fictional elaboration). Each chapter has a chemical element for its title and that element appears somehow in the story, either literally or metaphorically. In the first chapter Levi tells something of the history of ... Read More: Rating:  - A difficult book- review by 'Keyne Readers'This turned out not to be a good choice for us. Many of the group did not manage to read much of the book. There were a variety of individual reasons, but perhaps the book is simply difficult to engage with, and uncomfortable when you do. A number of people started it but turned to lighter books for bedtime and holiday reading (which is when most of us do our reading for this group, so heavyweight reading does not go down well). Chapter 1 in particular was not popular. People struggled with it. Someone remarked that there were just too many characters. One member had a copy of the book on her shelves for 20 years and had never got round to reading it. She got bogged down in the first chapter, but persisted and found the book got better as she ... Read More: Rating:  - wrong bookThis book with the title "The Periodic Table", "The best science book ever written" (comment by the London's Royal Institute) is completely misleading. If you are in search of a book explaining the periodic table, then this is NOT the one to buy. I couldn't care less about Primo Levi or the Jewish community in Piedmont. I'm returning this book! It's like buying a book called "The Christmas Cake, the ultimate cookery book" and ending up reading a story about sunny Africa. It goes into Room 101! Rating: - Recommended for academic fairies.The first few paragraphs seemed to cover a phenomenal sense of history, humanity and with beautiful prose, but the "Essential penguin" edition is printed with characters the size of one lead atom (or possibly 9pt type) and is subsequently unreadable. |
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