To some memoirists, a photo or a song may open memory’s flood gates, but for Primo Levi, a chemist by trade, it is the elements that evoke memories of life as a working chemist, the encroaching anti-Semitism, and then later his captivity by the Nazis. Surprisingly, Levi’s The Periodic Table is not a book of science. The table of contents would suggest otherwise with 21 elements making up 21 separate chapters, made up of 19 essays and two short stories. It is, however, an exp