
The Periodic Table
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Narrated by:
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Neville Jason
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By:
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Primo Levi
About this listen
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi is an impassioned response to the Holocaust: Consisting of 21 short stories, each possessing the name of a chemical element, the collection tells of the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian chemist before, during, and after Auschwitz in luminous, clear, and unfailingly beautiful prose. It has been named the best science book ever by the Royal Institution of Great Britain and is considered to be Levi's crowning achievement.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©1898 1975, 1982, 1994 & 2014 Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino; Translation © Schocken Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC (P)2015 Naxos AudioBooksslowly gripping. great for long commute.
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I completely recommend to all scientists and historians. What a shame he is no longer with us. I shall be listening or reading to his other accomplishments
Poinient stimulating and gripping
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As someone who never reads biographies autobiographies and memoirs I was initially disappointed and nearly gave up, but I'm glad I didn't as the book gets better and better and ends with a chapter that is one of the finest things I've ever read.
There's bits of the book that are a bit odd, it gets off to a rather weak start and is somewhat disjointed, as each chapter is really a short story and often unrelated to the previous one.
Even if you can't get into the book as a whole, read the last chapter - carbon - it is superb.
Odd but compelling and what a final chapter
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A charming and highly unusual autobiography of a wonderful man.
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I initially struggled to get into the style of the book. The first chapter, "The Noble Gasses", relates the quirks & idiosyncrasies of Levi's forebears, and the casual anti-semitism by ignorant 'goyim' they routinely encountered. The range of uncles, aunts, cousins etc. is exhaustive, and the language is at times elaborate, but as the chapter progresses the charm and character of his affectionate observations on human nature shines through. The rest of the book is more earthy.
One of the most moving tales for me was "Vanadium", where he encounters once again the German SS head of the lab at Auschwitz where he was a prisoner, his skill as a chemist exploited as slave labour. This contrasts with an imaginative story like "Carbon", where he traces the multifarious existences of an individual atom of carbon as it passes from limestone to air, to leaf to grape to person to ground etc.
It is beautifully narrated by Neville Jason, who in my imagination became Levi himself as an older man looking back. There was never any pronunciation difficulty with the German, Italian or French phrases, nor with the technical or chemical names.
Overall, a very pleasing audiobook.
Delightful! Elements of a Life Well Lived.
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Worth it for the last story alone. Carbon can be read in isolation but has much more impact after all the others.
Excellent collection
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Chemistry
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Primo Levi’s writings are distinguishably Northern Italian, industrial, technical, chemical nuts and bolts - it is an Italy that makes things, that prides itself on calling itself an engineering nation and which looks for echoes of itself in the Works and workings of the Germany machine. The same as the South but different. Similar to the North, but again crucially different. Jewish, of course, and tragically and sickeningly apart from those Wartime neighbours - and there is no better or more arresting description of what it was to be alone as a group in a Europe that does not seem to want you and offers no respite. Poetical, by discovery, the exegesis of any atom of Carbon in Expressionist-standing for the whole of the living and dead world down to the final full stop.
Re-read forty years there is enough that is pedestrian in the prose to confirm that others, such as Eco and Tabucchi have surpassed in style - however, the ability to reach across the years with an undimmed bridge to the central humanity of this man. One of the essential writers of late twentieth century European literature, deserves always to be read.
Returno to Torino
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I will look out for more titles read by this narrator. He is one of the very best
Excell ent
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Extraordinary on so many levels
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