Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi was born 31 July 1919 in Italy, trained as a chemist, and joined the partisans during the war. Captured and deported to Auschwitz, he spent a year as a prisoner in Nazi-occupied Poland. He returned and in 1947 published "If This Is a Man" (released in the United States as "Survival in Auschwitz"), his account of that year. In 1975 he published "The Periodic Table", a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories each named after a chemical element that plays a role in the narrative; the Royal Institution later named it the best science book ever written. On 11 April 19…