Chemical Education Today edited by
Book & Media Reviews
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chemistry by Ian Guch Alpha Books: New York, 2003. 400 pp. ISBN 1592571018 (paper). $18.95 reviewed by Michael S. Matthews
Since their debut in 1993, the varied titles in the Idiot’s Guide series have sold more than 20 million copies in 26 languages (1). With such circulation figures in mind, it’s almost surprising that it took the Idiot’s Guide publishers this long to come up with a guide targeting the potentially lucrative market offered by confused high school and college chemistry students. Producing this title was a good idea; but on closer examination, it appears that there may have been more concern devoted to getting the book out the door than to checking it for accuracy. Ian Guch, a high school teacher in Potomac, Maryland, is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Chemistry (hereafter CIGC). Guch also has authored The Complete Book of Chemistry Quizzes and Practice Problems (2), and he runs a Web site that disseminates materials he and others have developed to support chemistry teaching and learning (see http://www.chemfiesta.com, accessed Apr 2004). If you’ve read any other title in the Idiot’s Guide series, the format of this one will be no surprise. There are 28 chapters written in accessible language, with frequent sidebars reiterating definitions, pointing out potential misunderstandings, and offering representative problems. The problems are relatively few in number, so the reader who primarily wants practice working chemistry problems should probably consider a different book. The CIGC considers all the usual topics in introductory chemistry, although its coverage is a bit thin in a few areas including chromatography (eight sentences) and normality (one paragraph that mentions equivalents but never defines them). Guch’s passion for chemistry comes through in his writing, and I would bet that he is an entertaining lecturer. His presentation emphasizes explaining chemical concepts by analogy—from comparing the mole to a ream of paper to presenting intermolecular forces as Scotch tape in a world where covalent bonds are Crazy Glue. Guch sprinkles such examples throughout CIGC, and they mostly hit the mark. But his examples occasionally fall flat, and then they really take a dive. Anecdotes involving nose-picking, meatball-eating bus passengers, bedwetting children, and the like are distracting at best; at worst they turn off the reader, adding baggage to chemical concepts instead of illuminating them. If occasional less-than-effective examples were its only shortcoming—lame, my adolescent chemistry students would have termed these—the CIGC would be an adequate supple-
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Journal of Chemical Education
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Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
mentary text. Unfortunately, they aren’t. I am inclined to blame the editors more than the author. Between misprinted figures and other typographical errors, the book is chock full of mistakes—these are so pervasive that I would not recommend this edition of the CIGC to anyone. Here are just a few examples. Some misprints are minor irritants, such as the fact that the dartboard explanation of precision and accuracy (Figure 3.1) is printed sideways from the way the caption describes it. In other more aggravating examples (such as the electron dot diagram for CCl4 that is missing two electrons in Figure 10.9 or the ionic solid depicted as columns of positive and negative ions in Figure 8.5), nearly identical figures are depicted correctly elsewhere in the book. It’s hard to teach chemistry as an internally consistent and logical discipline when students may encounter a seemingly authoritative book, like this one, in which it is not. Other examples present a more serious problem because they are less obviously in error, as appears to be the case in the comparison of hexagonal and cubic crystalline structures in Figure 12.3. This distinction is difficult enough to depict clearly in color and is even more difficult within the blackand-white format of the CIGC illustrations, but as far as I can determine both views in the figure show a hexagonal close-packed structure. The black-and-white format is also particularly confusing when used to convey three-dimensionality, because the illustrators have pasted the same shading gradient into each component part without regard to the actual spatial orientation of the structures in question. The book’s summarized, or truncated, explanations raise a few pedagogical concerns, although these are but minor philosophical quibbles in comparison with the factual errors. Factual errors in a textbook can be the kiss of death, particularly for the student with a borderline understanding of chemistry. It is difficult to present an entire field well and with wit, especially within the five-month time frame Guch had available to write this book (p xxiii). But I’m left with the strong impression that the CIGC would not offer the struggling student much clarity and might even lead some readers to abandon altogether their study of chemistry. Literature Cited 1. Alpha Books, Penguin Group USA: New York. WWW document at http://www.idiotsguides.com/static/packages/us/about/ adult/alpha.htm (accessed Apr 2004). 2. Guch, Ian. The Complete Book of Chemistry Quizzes and Practice Problems. I. The First Semester; Cavalcade Publishing: Washington, D.C., 2000. CD-ROM, 173 pp, ISBN 0967650925
Michael S. Matthews is with the Duke University Talent Identification Program, 1121 West Main Street, Durham, NC 27701;
[email protected] Vol. 81 No. 7 July 2004
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