2292 Organometallics, Vol. 8, No. 9, 1989
Book Reviews
Book Reviews Organometallic Chemistry-An Overview. By J. S. Thayer. VCH Publishers, New York. 1988. xi + 170 pages. $35.00. According to the Preface, the present book on organometallic chemistry has been written “for the person with a reasonably good background in chemistry who may be interested in learning something about the subject”, because ”there is no currently extant book” that addresses this need. The book attempts to treat the fundamentals of organometallic chemistry in slightly over 100 pages; the remaining 70 pages are devoted, unwisely in my opinion, to the occurrence and significance of organometallic compounds in biology, to a curious Afterword of scarcely four pages aimed a t updating the literature coverage, and to indices on subjects, authors, and compounds mentioned in the text. In a book intended to present an overview of organometallic chemistry, the latter 70 pages seem to be poorly proportioned to the task the author has set himself. The first 100 pages of the treatment touch on bonding, preparation, reactions, and industrial applications in a very superficial and unsatisfying manner. With such a severe self-imposed constraint on pages for the actual text, it is startling to find that disproportionately large structural formulas have been used to illustrate the text; there seems to be no consistent pattern in the magnitude of such structures and many of them lack a necessary stereochemical perspective. The text accompanying these structures is often of such a general nature that it would be hard for the reader to appreciate the significanceof the concepts and reactions being explained. It is melancholy to report that much of the text is out-of-date and that factual errors are common. An instance on page 17 under the topic, Metal-Halogen Exchange, might illustrate this point. We are informed that “chlorides are used in this reaction, since alkyl bromides often give coupling reactions...”; practicing organometallic chemists are well-aware that chlorides are seldom used in this reaction and that bromides and iodides are the substrates of choice. The occurrence of such unclear, often wrong, commentary is unfortunately not the exception. As to structural or mechanistic explanations, the level of treatment in this volume certainly is not up to that of a reader with a reasonably good background in chemistry. Orbital concepts of bonding are employed at a very low level of sophistication; the lack of mechanistic generalization is completely out of keeping with the high level of mechanistic studies pervading the present study of organometallic chemistry; and the reader is given no basis
for even a general understanding of how structure-reactivity relationships apply to the behavior of metal-carbon bonds. The book claims to give a survey of current activity, especially in industrial and biological applications of organometallic compounds. In those places where the author discusses industrial organometallic chemistry, his awareness of recent advances in our understanding of catalysis, be it Ziegler-Natta, Reppe, or hydroformylation, is surprisingly out-of-date. His treatment gives scarcely any idea of how many advances have been made in the last decade. As to his treatment of organometallic compounds in biology, his specialty, there is possibly in the 30 pages devoted to this a useful survey of the occurrence and toxic aspects of organometallics in our environment, but again, the treatment seems extremely qualitative and not challenging enough for a person with a good background in chemistry. In an area of science so rich in textbooks, monographs, and research journals, this brief book cannot be said to fill any clearly defined need; ita claim to be for the general chemist with a good background in chemistry cannot be honored. Over the last 20 years there have been a considerable number of introductory treatments of both main-group and transition-metal organometallic chemistry. In 1986, for example, Parkins and Poller published a useful book, “An Introduction to Organometallic Chemistry”, which in a far more effective way covers the chemistry and bonding of these important compounds in 250 pages. Thayer’s plea that there is “no currently extant book” to serve as an introduction is clearly then incorrect. It might be added that the awareness that Thayer shows for the literature of organometallic chemistry, as evidenced by his references, is erratic, extremely uneven, and, for the reader, unhelpful. Directing someone seeking further information to Wilkinson, Stone, and Ebel’snine-volume series, for instance, is akin to pointing out the library to a student. Many standard reference books, such as those by this reviewer and R. B. King on “Organometallic Syntheses”, are not even mentioned. As an author myself of several books on organometallic chemistry, I am uneasy in criticizing so explicitly a fellow author, but I do feel that this book has failed to offer the chemical community a demonstrably useful introduction to organometallic chemistry. Accordingly, I strongly urge the reader searching for an interesting, clear, and authoritative overview of organometallic chemistry to seek elsewhere. John J. Eisch, State University of New York at Binghamton
