Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Organic Laboratory Techniques, 3rd Edition by Ralph J. Fessenden, Joan S. Fessenden, and Patty Feist Brooks/Cole: Pacific Grove, CA, 2001. 229 pp, index. ISBN 0-534-37981-8. Paper, $38.95. reviewed by Daniel Berger
Organic Laboratory Techniques is not a stand-alone lab text. If you want to provide a single laboratory textbook for your students, including experiments, you should use one of the many integrated laboratory texts in existence; most of them provide the same technical information. My favorite is Lehman’s Operational Organic Chemistry. Organic Laboratory Techniques is not a guide for someone running a laboratory, whether a research lab or a teaching lab. For that, I recommend Loewenthal’s A Guide for the Perplexed Organic Experimentalist. Organic Laboratory Techniques is not a chatty discussion of laboratory pitfalls, dangers to the student’s grade, and common mistakes made by beginners. Instead, you want Zubrick’s The Organic Chem Lab Survival Manual. Organic Laboratory Techniques is intended as a manual for the beginner, with enough information to make it useful for students in graduate school and beyond. It teaches basic techniques of laboratory manipulation and analysis, with a little of the theory of each. Because it is in direct competition with Zubrick’s text, Organic Laboratory Techniques consciously provides more depth in certain areas, such as toxicological information and common laboratory calculations, on which Zubrick is weak. Fessenden, Fessenden, and Feist integrate more theory with their descriptions of techniques and provide more detail than Zubrick on more different types of apparatus. This is why Organic Laboratory Techniques is useful for graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Organic Laboratory Techniques does not have detailed
1336
discussions of how to set up laboratory apparatus, with compilations of the most common mistakes. It would be good to see, for example, a discussion of how to set up glassware for a simple distillation, including the order of assembly, how to clamp the glassware in place, and what to do with that pesky thermometer adapter—Zubrick has all of the above. I have seen students make every mistake in the book (Zubrick’s book), but Fessenden et al. don’t discuss any of them. This is why Organic Laboratory Techniques is less useful for undergraduate students, especially for beginners who have never touched jointware or done a recrystallization before. If I had graduate students, I’d require them to own this text; I know they’d use it often. I wish I’d had a copy when I was in graduate school. But for lower-level undergraduates, Fessenden et al. may not be as appropriate. I asked a few of my introductory organic chemistry students to compare Zubrick’s The Organic Chem Lab Survival Manual, which I’ve been having them buy, with Fessenden, Fessenden and Feist’s Organic Laboratory Techniques. They preferred Zubrick, finding it more readable and with more information that is useful on their level. Organic Laboratory Techniques is—I repeat—not for use as a laboratory textbook unless you provide your student with photocopied or modular experiments or require them to find procedures in the chemical literature. It should be excellent for advanced lab courses of the latter type; it provides enough information for students who have seen the equipment before, as well as discussions of theory and equipment appropriate to a more advanced level. But I do not recommend this text for the rank beginner. Organic Laboratory Techniques and The Organic Chem Lab Survival Manual are competing texts that are superficially similar, but are not appropriate for the same students or courses; which is appropriate for your course you must decide for yourself. Daniel Berger is in the Science Department, Bluffton College, Bluffton, OH 45817-1196;
[email protected].
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 78 No. 10 October 2001 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
