Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Organic Structural Spectroscopy Joseph B. Lambert, Herbert F. Shurvell, David A. Lightner, and R. Graham Cooks. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1998. viii + 568 pp. ISBN 0 13 258690 8. $76.00.
This book will be a welcome addition to the library of any organic chemist and will be particularly useful as a text for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses emphasizing spectroscopy as a structure determination tool. Its coverage and level are ideal, between the introductory organic and physical chemistry courses and real structural problems which require a deeper and broader understanding of methods and interpretation to solve. It also bridges a gap in texts, between the introductory organic texts, specialized monographs on individual methods, and instrumental analysis texts. One advantage of this book is that it reflects current research practice, as it was written by experts in each spectroscopic technique. Some traditional topics, such as scanning NMR spectrometers, are barely mentioned. Replacing them are NMR relaxation times, the nuclear Overhauser effect, DEPT, COSY, HETCOR, NOESY, TOCSY, etc., and MS ionization techniques such as CI, DI (SIMS, FAB, PD, MALDI), and electrospray. Such a collaboration has the potential for inconsistency in level and approach; however, the four authors have clearly worked as a team to produce a well-organized and consistent text. There are four core sections, on nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), vibrational (IR), electronic, and mass (MS) spectra. Each section has about three chapters. The first, “Introduction and Experimental Methods”, provides integrated theory for the whole section. For example, the first chapter in the electronic section describes the relationships between UV–vis absorption, CD, and ORD; the first chapter in the vibration section relates absorption and Raman. The second chapter in each section describes the spectroscopic behavior of the functional groups, with data tables, examples, and discussions for each. For example, in the vibrational section it includes compact tables ordered both by functional group and by frequency. The third chapter in each section, “Structural/ Chemical Analysis”, has a discussion of the analytical uses of the technique and includes advanced interpretation techniques. For example, the electronic chapter describes the Woodward rules, the octant rule, and exciton coupling. The five NMR chapters are organized a bit differently: one chapter is on theory, two are on spectroscopic behavior—one for chemical shift and one for coupling constant (each for carbon and hydrogen), and two are on analysis—one for onedimensional and one for two-dimensional techniques. Peptides and nucleic acids are integrated into all sections. Comparisons are inevitable in book reviews: in this case, of the first collaboration of most of these authors, Organic Structural Analysis (OSA) (1), with their second effort, Introduction to Organic Spectroscopy (IOS) (2), and with the popular Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds (SIOC) (3). OSA provided current information about structural techniques but had no problems; that oversight was corrected with IOS. Organic Structural Spectroscopy provides an even better variety of problems at the end of each chapter and 35 chal-
lenging integrated problems, all with data of consistent and high quality. Most problems do not include solutions or references, but the integrated problems have clues—formulas and functional groups for each problem. Consistent with their goal “to obtain enough such information to overdetermine the structure” (page 5), the following are provided for each unknown compound: CI and EI MS, 1H and 13C NMR 1-D spectra (and sometimes DEPT), COSY and HETCOR, FTIR (sometimes Raman) and UV–vis spectra (sometimes CD or ORD). I enjoyed working the integrated problems so much that it was hard to return to writing this review. For the graduate student in organic chemistry, Organic Structural Spectroscopy would be a far better choice than SIOC. It provides a much better foundation in theory, integrating related techniques and presenting state-of-the-art methods, without sacrificing the detailed discussion of spectral interpretation so necessary for routine spectral analysis. Suggestions. Crystallography is an increasingly important tool in organic chemistry and should be restored to the book (it was part of OSA); organic chemists need to know enough about it to use the results intelligently. Fluorescence and phosphorescence are also accessible and informative and of particular importance in bioorganic chemistry; they could easily be included. Literature Cited 1. Lambert, J. B.; Shurvell, H. F.; Verbit, L.; Cooks, R. G.; Stout, G. H. Organic Structural Analysis; Macmillan: New York, 1978. 2. Lambert, J. B.; Shurvell, H. F.; Lightner, D. A.; Cooks, R. G.; Stout, G. H. Introduction to Organic Spectroscopy; Macmillan: New York, 1987. 3. Silverstein, R. M.; Bassler, G. C.; Morrill, T. C. Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds, 5th ed.; Wiley: New York, 1991. Linda M. Sweeting Towson University Baltimore, MD 21252
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