Shelfology Book Pairing

by Primo Levi

In this literary masterpiece, one of the twentieth century’s most significant writers reflects on his life before and after the Holocaust, merging the scientific and the humane into a profound “work of healing” (New York Times Book Review) • Fiftieth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Rivka Galchen As a youth, Primo Levi became fascinated by the laboratory, a site where the mysteries of the material world are unlocked and substances reveal their deepest truths. In this graceful, vital book—originally published in Italian in 1975—his passion for chemistry spans his extraordinary life story, with each chapter’s theme anchored in a different element of the periodic table. Beginning with his childhood in Italy’s Piedmontese Jewish community, Levi narrates his years as a student and fledgling scientist, before the descent of World War II, when he fought as an anti-fascist partisan until his arrest and transportation to Auschwitz. After surviving captivity, he returned to his work as a chemist and as a writer, striving in both realms to transmute matter into meaning. An artistic masterpiece of the highest order, The Periodic Table champions the power of friendship and curiosity to transcend times of tyranny and testifies to the fundamental interconnectedness of all the stuff of the universe—including us.

by Michael Herr

‘The best book I have ever read on men and war in our time’ – John Le Carré Michael Herr went to Vietnam as a war correspondent for Esquire. He returned to tell the real story in all its hallucinatory madness and brutality, cutting to the quick of the conflict and its seductive, devastating impact on a generation of young men. His unflinching account is haunting in its violence, but even more so in its honesty. First published in 1977, Dispatches was a revolutionary piece of new journalism that evoked the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam which has forever shaped our understanding of the conflict. A groundbreaking piece of journalism, part of the Picador Collection, which inspired Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket.