Primo Levi

Primo Levi (1919–87) lived most of his life in Turin. During the Nazi occupation of Italy, he joined a partisan group in the Alps, but was soon arrested and sent to an internment camp at Fossoli and then to Auschwitz. After the war he worked as a chemist in a paint factory and wrote many books, including Survival in Auschwitz (Collier, 1961) and The Periodic Table (Schocken, 1984), which London’s Royal Institute voted in 2006 “the best science book ever.”