Chemical Education Today edited by
Book & Media Reviews An Introduction to Hydrogen Bonding George A. Jeffrey. Oxford University Press: New York, 1997. 303+ pp. ISBN 0-19-509549-9. $29.95.
Modern publishers prefer to direct books toward specific target markets, and this book is said to be aimed at the undergraduate senior or beginning graduate student special topics course on hydrogen bonding. Whether there really are many such courses and whether this book would serve as a textbook is debatable. On the other hand, it will be a valuable reference for all chemists interested in hydrogen bonding in structural chemistry, supermolecular chemistry, and biomolecular recognition. It has long been a tradition in scholarship for a master to put together a general treatment of the topic that was the focus of his or her career. An understanding of the special relationships among otherwise diverse observations becomes apparent only through prolonged attention and it is good to pass this perspective to future scholars. What better reason can a book have for its existence? The book begins with a brief (too brief?) historical perspective on hydrogen bonding. This is followed by a chapter describing various modern theoretical descriptions of hydrogen bonds, including the Morokuma decomposition of H-bond energies into contributing attractive and repulsive terms and descriptions of H-bond potential energy diagrams. The subsequent three chapters on strong, moderate, and weak hydrogen bonds are illustrated with example structures ranging from the hydrogen bifluoride ion to acetylene π interactions. There are five chapters covering special topics including water hydrates, clathrates, hydrogen bonding in biomolecules, and finally a chapter giving a brief description of physical and calculational methods for studying hydrogen bonding. But this book is not organized as a traditional textbook with general principles pronounced prominently, followed by more complex details and sophisticated applications to illustrate these general principles. In this book the reader is expected to extract general principles from the detailed experimental results given in a vast number of tables and figures. The author has collected and compared data from hundreds of experiments with only minimal verbal exposition. The book strongly reflects the diffractionist’s background of the author; there are dozens of tables of distances and angles derived from X-ray or neutron diffraction data. To make the point that maximal H-bonding need not require a 180° angle for O–H& O, Jeffrey gives a distribution plot of angle vs H&O distance for various carbohydrate systems. The comparison of scatterplots of O–H&O angles vs H&O distances or of the same angles vs O-to-O distances for carbohydrates show that the latter parameter is relatively insensitive to angle or hydrogen bond distance. Students using this as a textbook may be put off by this reliance on tabular and graphics information and the lack of written comments. Their frustration would be further kindled when important concepts are left undefined and methods unexplained. As examples, the conic-correction factor for bond angles in crystal structures is mentioned at least twice but never explained; type I and II clathrate hydrates are described in a table but never defined in words. Many tables and figures require more explanation than is given either
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in the legend or the text. There are also some incorrectly drawn structural formulas, especially in Chapter 3. For the more sophisticated reader this abundance of tables and figures is a virtue. There is nowhere else one can go for such a wealth of information and a comparison of the hydrogen bonding features of such a wide variety of compounds. The focus is on the recent literature, with more than 750 references covering up to 1995, and the experienced reader can go to that literature for expanded descriptions. Contemporary controversies such as “the presence or absence of C–H&B bonds” or “the structure of water” are handled impartially but with Jeffrey’s special take on such topics. For example, he raises the question whether shorter C–H& B contacts in crystals should be taken as evidence of special attractive forces, an unconventional thought to most structural chemists. Such contacts may actually be forced contacts because in the Morokuma description of hydrogen bonds the repulsive exchange term dominates at closer distances over the attractive electrostatic forces. Jeffrey has been involved with such structures since the 1950s and he provides an excellent overview of this interesting and practically important topic. The chapter on hydrogen bonding in biological molecules is the best place for a biochemistry graduate student to begin to learn more than is given in standard physical and organic chemistry textbooks. The book is dedicated to Linus Pauling and frequent footnotes give interesting anecdotes acknowledging the seminal work of Pauling in many topics covered in this book. In summary, I would not select this as a required textbook for my class on biomolecular structure, but I would put a copy on reserve and I would dig deep into this mine of information to illustrate many a lecture point. It is a valuable addition to any chemist's library. Michael J. Minch Chemistry Department University of the Pacific Stockton, CA 95211
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 76 No. 6 June 1999 • Journal of Chemical Education
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