Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews Principles of Modern Chemistry, 3rd Edition David W. Oxtoby and Norman H. Nachtrieb. Saunders College Publishing: New York, 1996. xix + 848 pp. Figs. and tables. ISBN: 0 0300 5904 6. $91.
Like some classical music FM radio stations, Oxtoby and Nachtrieb play to a select audience. This is a general chemistry text designed for chemistry majors with at least some preknowledge of calculus. It presumes a rather strong chemistry background, condensing fundamentals and presenting them generally much earlier than other texts. Before Chapter 1 is completed, students will have used Avogadro's number, empirical formulas and percent composition, balancing by inspection, mass relationships, limiting reactants, and percent yields in chemical reactions. All this in the first 36 pages. John Moore (Editorial, J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 253) opines that many students are bored with college chemistry courses because they are largely a rehash of their high school courses. If this is correct, Oxtoby would hardly be expected to be boring. The chapter order and content is nonconventional. Equilibrium is discussed in Chapter 5 (of 23 overall), while chemical bonding waits until Chapter 14. Chapter 15, “The Interaction of Light with Molecules”, covers both photochemistry and spectroscopy; Chapter 18, “Chemistry Processes”, is largely industrial chemistry; Chapter 19, “The Lithosphere”, is essentially geochemistry and metallurgy; and Chapter 20, “Ceramics and Semiconductors”, might be classified as material science. The book concludes with three descriptive chapters on the metals, organic chemistry, and polymers. The presumption must be that if so much fundamental chemistry is compressed into the earlier chapters, material not usually emphasized in general chemistry texts can find its way into later ones. Advanced treatment of topics abounds. The Lennard– Jones potential expression is included in the discussion of intermolecular forces in Chapter 3, “The Gaseous State”. Four
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text pages, part of a recurring feature section called “A Deeper Look”, are devoted to solving for hydronium ion concentrations in very weak or very dilute solutions. Practical applications of calculus occur often—in a presentation of the Carnot cycle in Chapter 8, and throughout Chapters 9, “Spontaneous Change and Equilibrium”, and 11, “Chemical Kinetics”. It should be noted that Sections 4 and 5 of Appendix C, titled, respectively, “Slopes of Curves and Derivatives” and “Areas under Curves and Integrals”, present a good introduction to calculus, even including several problems with answers. Advanced treatment of topics continues with Chapter 13, “Quantum Mechanics and Atomic Structure”, the Schrödinger equation in Chapter 14, spectroscopy in Chapter 15, ligand field theory in Chapter 16, lattice energies of solids in Chapter 17, and band theory in Chapter 20. Throughout all this, an effort has been made to mainstream the text. The ancillary package for students and instructor is competitive; 1665 end-of-chapter problems of all sorts and complexities are present; additional multipart practice exercises and “Concepts and Skills” questions precede each problem section; and there are 169 solved in-chapter exercises. The writing is concise and even entertaining at times. For example (p 578), “In nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, low-energy radio waves (photons carrying energies between 0.00002 and 0.00020 kJ mol{1 ‘tickle’ the nuclei in a molecule.” While moving rapidly and to greater heights, Oxtoby’s text shows efforts to remain traditional and warrants attention in the general chemistry market today. But Oxtoby finds the majority of its adoptions in honors course and by prestigious institutions. It might be recommended at this time of curricular change in general chemistry to give it and its approach a good long second look. Paul S. Poskozim Northeastern Illinois University 5500 North St. Louis Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60625
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 75 No. 1 January 1998 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
