Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Chemical Kinetics and Catalysis by Richard I. Masel Wiley-Interscience: New York, 2001. 952 pp. ISBN 0-471-24197-0. $99.95. reviewed by Richard Pagni
There are many methods, experimental and theoretical, usually carried out in combination, by which a reaction mechanism is deduced. Chemical kinetics in all of its guises perhaps plays the most important role in this task. The subject, of course, is covered with varying degrees of sophistication and completeness in most chemistry courses. Hundreds of books, journals, series, compendia, and dissertations include the words chemical kinetics or kinetics in their titles. To this list may be added the comprehensive, up-to-date, and rigorous textbook under consideration: Chemical Kinetics and Catalysis by Masel. The author, who has written a previous book on reactions on solid surfaces, is a researcher in and acknowledged expert on chemical kinetics and catalysis and teaches courses on these subjects at the University of Illinois. He has written, first and foremost, a textbook for students that also can be used as a reference book. The author writes in an easy-tofollow conversational style that students will like. This is an asset, as the material discussed is often difficult. To assist the student in learning the material the author has included large numbers of tables, figures, reactions, and equations in each chapter. A real asset are the numerous exhaustively worked out problems at the end of most chapters, which often require some elementary programming in Excel. There are also large numbers of unworked problems of varying difficulty for the students to work out on their own, some of which require consulting the original literature for information. There are references at the end of each chapter and the book
for further reading, and Masel has developed a Web site to be used in conjunction with this book. The book contains 14 chapters, 11 on kinetics and 3 on catalysis. The topics therein are mostly what one would expect to find in a book on kinetics and catalysis but include some unexpected ones such as prediction of reaction mechanisms, solvents as catalysts, the Woodward–Hoffmann rules, and linear free-energy relationships. The coverage is broad and detailed and neither experiment nor theory is slighted. More than 100 pages, for example, are devoted to the important question of why reactions have activation barriers. Most topics are introduced historically. I was surprised to learn how sophisticated kinetics was a century ago, the age in which the subject became a discipline. Methods developed by the pioneering kineticists for distinguishing one rate law from another are still viable today, for example. The text, as fine as it is, could have been improved by better proofreading and copyediting. Some of the chemical structures are poorly or inaccurately drawn and there are enough errors of all sorts to be irritating. For example, tables and equations mentioned in the text occasionally don’t match their actual counterparts. One often repeated error that only someone living in Tennessee would perhaps notice—and find amusing—is the reference to S. C. Lind, a distinguished physical chemist from Tennessee, as S. C. Lund. Bodenstein and Lind studied the kinetics of the reaction H 2 + Br2 → 2HBr at the beginning of the 20th century. The book would make an excellent text for a rigorous one- or two-semester course in chemical kinetics. Only graduate and upper-level undergraduate students with a solid background in physical chemistry would be prepared for such a course. The book may also serve as a reference for those whose interest in chemical kinetics and catalysis is peripheral to their primary teaching and research functions. Richard Pagni is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1600;
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 3 March 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
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