Po/yhedron Vol. 6, No. 8, PP. 17154716, 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd. Printed in Great Britain

Structural Methods in Inorganic Chemistry. E. A. V. Ebsworth, David W. H. Rankin and Stephen Cradock, Blackwell Scientific, Oxford, 1987, ISBN o-632-01 592-6 (price unknown)

This is the most enjoyable chemistry book I have read for years. We all have systematic textbooks in inorganic chemistry and I am glad this is not another of those. We all have books as well on the physical methods we specialise in, but not many people are able to take on writing a book which covers the application of nearly all the spectroscopic, diffraction and other techniques we need to solve structural problems. This is what these three authors from Edinburgh have done, and their success shows that the intellectual tradition of the Athens of the North lives on.

Each chapter describes a single, or two similar, tech- niques. Short theoretical and practical introductions pre- cede penetrating accounts of applications. There is emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of each method and all the chapters end with a set of testing problems and plenty of references to books, reviews and papers.

When you turn to the end of the book to see if you’ve got the problems solved you will be surprised to find only half the problems have been given answers. This is because the authors are trying to stimulate us to do some open-ended thinking and discussion. They rightly maintain that a researcher’s work is never done and that an interesting piece of chemistry always throws up fresh ideas for more experiments.

After you have recovered from that shock you get another when you find there are no answers at all to the problems in chapter 10. This last chapter is worth the money alone. It consists of 18 case studies, intriguing problems which have fascinated chemists for years. There is the XeF, story, the N20, story, the problem of eclipsed or staggered ferrocene, agostic hydrogens, where the elec- trons go in reduced or excited dipyridyl complexes, and more. Most of these illustrate the principles that we need to use a combination of techniques to solve structural problems in inorganic chemistry, and that for worthwhile chemistry there are no easy answers.

I particularly enjoyed the crystallography and NMR chapters. The former is the best account I have yet seen for people who may not do it themselves but want to know what it is about, and you will not need to know what a reciprocal lattice is. You can also read how alleged [ClFJ+[CuFJ might really be [Cu(H,O),]“[SiF,]‘-.

In the NMR chapter there is a clear critical survey of modern developments, including multiple resonance,

BOOK REVIEWS

multi-pulse methods, applications to the solid state and use of liquid crystals, as well as all those delights like INEPT and INADEQUATE which make the layman think he is. If you want to know what these and other acronyms like MIKES and RIKES stand for there’s a good glossary in the first chapter. This is an excellent innovation which all books should have in the space often wasted with accounts of nomenclature rules.

Another good chapter contains a sensible combination of “ordinary” electronic spectra with photoelectron spec- tra, but the balance favours the second of these unduly. There is still plenty of good work being done on ligand field transitions in electronic spectra. A more extended treatment of these would have allowed a case study in the last chapter on how electronic and ESR spectra can be combined to reveal structure in copper(I1) compounds. I was also sorry not to see a chapter about magneto- chemistry, which is so closely linked to structure. If this had been covered we could have had a case study on haemocyanin or some other biological system. Some of the necessary space could be generated by omitting the well written but unnecessary sections on quantitative analysis by IR or UV spectra.

Mentioning haemocyanin brings me to my other adverse criticism, that the authors take a slightly restric- ted view of inorganic chemistry. Nearly all the main text and all the case studies describe work on discrete molecules or ions, but the subject of inorganic chemistry is much wider than this and students in particular would benefit from reading about how ideas developed by the study of molecules can be applied, with adjustment, to proteins, say, or intercalation compounds or electronic materials.

The greatest use of this book ought to be to train Ph.D. students. There is plenty of material here for post- graduate courses and exercises. If your students do get hold of this book, make them read it all, not just use it as a reference book for odd topics or even a few chapters. The writing is fluent and conversational, and even funny, as when [PtMe,OH] “was reported to explode on com- bustion, and explosion can lead to inaccurate results”, or when the WAHUHA technique in NMR is described as “not an easy experiment to perform successfully, and it is even harder to understand”.

I detected no serious errors in any section in which I thought myself knowledgeable and strongly recommend this book to all readers of this journal.

Department of Chemistry Queen Mary College Mile End Road London El 4NS, U.K.

PETER THORNTON

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