Primo Levi - The Periodic Table (PDF) 1975 torrent

Primo Levi - The Periodic Table (PDF) 1975
The Periodic Table
By Primo Levi, 1975
Translated from Italian by Raymond Rosenthal, 1984
ISBN-10: 0805210415
ISBN-13: 978-0805210415

"The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi, the Italian chemist, is one of the great books of the 20th century.
In 2006, the Royal Institute of Britain named it "the best science book ever written".
Praise, indeed, but it's not just a science book. It's a memoir, it's a diary, it's a philosophy, it's a contemplative book. Levi uses as his overall structure the periodic table: each chapter is given the name of an element: Hydrogen, Zinc, Iron, Potassium, Mercury – and uses the qualities of each element as the jumping-off point into a story. It sounds clever, right? But it is more than clever. It is perfect. There is no other book like it. Emotional, poetic, transcendent, the chemistry of the book is not just a metaphor, or some New Agey symbol.
Levi was a chemist. He knew what he was about. So it is a science book, in a way. You get to know each element intimately: its history, its discovery, its qualities. But it is what Levi does with each element that takes the breath away. His periodic table structure elevates it from other memoirs, although the stories he tells here are deeply personal. He connects our human experience to the experience of the elements that make up our world, in a way that now makes me think of Malick's Tree of Life, with its sweeping connectivity between the birth of the universe and our everyday lives. There is no separation between the two events."

Notes:

- This e-Book is not a repost of an available commercial PDF. Instead, it was lovingly scanned from the original book, OCR'ed, proofread, spellchecked, formatted and PDF'ed by me, which took a couple of weeks. I don't think it's even appeared in e-Book format before.

- Citation for it being awarded "Best Science Book Ever": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_science_book_ever

- Primo Levi died in 1987, so this isn't denying him any royalties. His other books provide more of his experiences of the Holocaust.

- There's only a PDF as I find it a pain to convert to other formats... sorry. Feel free of course!