Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Perspectives in Environmental Chemistry Donald L. MacAlady, Ed. Oxford University Press: New York, 1997. Cloth: ISBN 0-195-10208-8. $65.00. Paper: ISBN 0-195-10209-6. $45.00.
In this useful new volume, Donald MacAlady of the Colorado School of Mines has gathered together 20 contributions from experts in diverse aspects of environmental chemistry. Although the topics cover a broad range, this is no elementary textbook suitable for lower-level undergraduates. Authors or teams review their own interdisciplinary research area and give some of their ideas on the most important areas in the field for the future. Thus, this book is suitable for upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate students in the environmental sciences and as a general or supplemental text in environmental chemistry taught at these levels. In most cases, no background in the area is assumed, but readers are quickly and intensely brought to the frontiers of each subject in two dozen pages or so. Part I, “Environmental Chemistry of Condensed Phases”, includes extensive discussions of colloids, trace metals, organic contaminants (including natural ones), the solid–water interface, and microbiologically mediated reactions in water systems. Part II, “Atmospheric Environmental Chemistry”, contains three chapters on stratospheric processes, two on processes in the troposphere, and one each on carbon dioxide and chemical transport models. The final part, entitled “Applied Environmental Chemistry”, covers sample collection, passive bioremediation, and metal–phytoplankton and atmosphere– water–rock interactions. Each chapter begins with an abstract, ends with an extensive list of references, and contains many of the sort of informal diagrams and summary tables that are so helpful to the novice in a field and signal the book’s origin as papers from an ACS symposium of a few years ago. In form, the chapters have some of the character of lectures from an intensive short course and some of those of a review article. The book contains a tremendous amount of knowledge about research in environmental chemistry packed into its five hundred heavily illustrated pages. On the negative side, there are no exercises or problems for students to try, and few chapters have suggestions for further reading. Overall, it fulfills its stated objectives for advanced-level students as stated in the first paragraph of this review. Colin Baird Department of Chemistry University of Western Ontario London, ON N6A 5B7, Canada
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 76 No. 4 April 1999 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
