Accidental Blogger

Okay, it’s not really a science book. But it is about science. It is also about being a scientist – a Jewish scientist in Mussolini’s Italy. It is about suddenly becoming an outsider in one’s home.  About fascists and Nazis. And cruelty, humiliation, kindness and human dignity. It also happens to be one of my favorite books whose full length review I probably would have written some day. Periodic Table by Primo Levi is currently in the news so I thought I would combine the news story with a few words of my own on the book and the author.

"Primo Levi’s haunting memoir of life as a Jew in Mussolini’s Italy told through the unlikely metaphor of chemistry has been named the best science book ever written.

The Periodic Table, published in 1975, fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

"This book pinions my awareness to the solidity of the world around me," said former Guardian science editor Tim Radford, who was the book’s advocate at the event. "The science book is the ultimate in non-fiction," he told the Guardian’s weekly science podcast. "You’ve got the entire universe and the entire sub-atomic world to choose from and everything that has happened in it."

The shortlist : Primo Levi The Periodic Table (winner), Konrad Lorenz King Solomon’s Ring, Tom Stoppard Arcadia, Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene

Other nominations:  James Watson The Double Helix,Bertolt Brecht The Life of Galileo, Peter Medawar Pluto’s Republic, Charles Darwin Voyage of the Beagle, Stephen Pinker The Blank Slate, Oliver Sacks A Leg to Stand On

Periodic Table is a beautiful, disturbing, sad, yet  oddly cheerful book. Odd because I knew a little about Primo Levi’s life before I read the book. I knew that he was an accomplished chemist and later a renowned author. Between these two careers, his life was interrupted by harrassment at the hands of Mussolini’s fascist brigade, capture by the Nazis and exile to Auschwitz.  It was a harrowing experience.  Levi narrates it with humor, compassion and  a calm equilibrium. Periodic Table is not a true memoir. But it is indeed the story of Levi’s life related through symbols, allusions and metaphors of chemistry. It is also a book of history – of his family, friends, Italian Jews, the study of science and of Italy before and after Mussolini. The partially factual recollections are interspersed with a couple of fully fictional chapters – the author’s flights of fancy.

I later read Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz, an actual account of his years at the Nazi death camp. Along with Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Levi’s book about Auschwitz is among the most poignant telling of a survivor’s tale in that hell on earth. That I also knew of Levi’s subsequent suicide in 1987, made the experience of reading both books specially wrenching.

Periodic Table, the book, unfolds over twenty one chapters, each named after an element of the scientific Periodic Table, the handy, precise and elegant information chart at a chemist’s disposal which catalogs the characteristics of all known elements on earth. The book’s first chapter is Argon, an inert gas and the last one is Carbon, the essential element in all living matter. In between are chapters called Nitrogen, Tin, Arsenic, Potassium and Titanium among others. Each one glitters like Gold (the tenth chapter). I loved this book.