The Periodic Table

First published in 1975, this book is a sequence of autobiographical essays, each titled with a chemical element that supplies a memory, a workplace, or a metaphor. Levi writes of his Piedmont Jewish family, student chemistry, Alpine climbing, and the paint and varnish trade, then of capture, Auschwitz, and the camp laboratory where cerium and vanadium become matters of survival. Later chapters return to factory life, a German customer, and a carbon atom's imagined journey. The pieces mix memoir, anecdote, and scientific parable. The book is a chemist's life in chapters, not a textbook of the elements.

Bound in off-white cloth cover and spine blocked with a blue, grey and brown design. Green endpapers and slipcase.