Principles of Chemistry

by Michael Munowitz

"Can Munowitz write or what!" exclaimed one advance reviewer of this extraordinary new text. Read a few pages, and you'll see what all the excitement is about. Intended primarily for college freshmen, this exceptionally lucid, carefully paced, elegantly designed, well-illustrated volume will appeal to curious readers of any age who want to know more about the innermost workings of the "central science." In the words of another advance reviewer, the Munowitz book "reveals the beauty of chemistry in an unusual, graceful, narrative style. Compared with standard textbooks, it is poetic." This book is unusual in several respects. Perhaps the most obvious, at first glance, is the distinctive pattern of white and gray stripes that appear when you view its pages edge-on. The striped pattern is a superficial manifestation of a novel's internal structure. Unlike a standard chemistry textbook, in which each chapter is fragmented into a hodgepodge of disparate parts--text, boxed features, worked exercises, solved and unsolved problems, in-chapter and end-of-chapter summaries, miscellaneous decorative elements-- each chapter in Principles of Chemistry has a much simpler an uninterrupted narrative core (white pages), followed by a Review and Guide to Problems section (gray pages). In principles first, then practice. The tutorial, problem-solving sections at the ends of the chapters amount, in effect, to a built-in study guide, thus obviating the need for a separate volume of this type. In addition, the long run of predominantly white pages at the back of the book consists, for the most part, of an unusually complete set of appendices devoted to such important matters as nomenclature, mathematics, assorted tables, and a glossary. Taken just by themselves, then, the white pages that constitute the first, narrative parts of the book's 21 chapters add up to a fairly modest-sized book-within-a-book-- at least by comparison with other texts for the introductory general chemistry course. And what a book it is! As the reviewers' comments quoted elsewhere attest, the novel intrachapter organization of the Munowitz text contributes to another of this book's distinctive its remarkably coherent "story line." The main driving force here, though, is the extraordinary power and clarity of the author's writing by far the most remarked-upon special attribute of this book. Just crack it open anywhere and start reading, and you'll see what all the fuss is about.

Genres: Science, Chemistry

Hardcover

First published July 17, 1999

Reviews

[Evan Milner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the way a chemistry textbook SHOULD be written.

The organization is simple but elegant: each topic is divided into three sections a detailed and VERY well written general discussion that concentrates on concepts rather than their application; this is followed by a more tersely written review (printed on a darker shade of paper for convenience) that treats the same material in a less discursive manner while also demonstrating how to apply the concepts to standard types of general chemistry questions; lastly, of course, there is a selection of questions.

In terms of content, Munowitz covers the same material as most other general chemistry texts, but with a greater emphasis on the quantum mechanical underpinnings. He does not regard 'physics' as a dirty word and the result is a more cohesive account of the subject than you find in many other textbooks which shy away from these matters or treat them in a cursory fashion.

The book also looks very different to most other general chemistry texts: the diagrams are black and white (with subtle red highlighting) and refreshingly free of the sort of multicoloured clutter that mars the graphics of other textbooks. The text itself is printed single-column in a legible typeface (which alone is enough to recommend it over most of the competition).

A lot of thought has gone into this book, but apparently nobody took any notice as it seems to have disappeared into the mists of time (it was published in 1999 and is long out of print). The fact that universities persist in making students spend hundreds of dollars on the umpteenth editions of the same old textbooks (updated every couple of years in order to add a bunch of new mistakes to the uncorrected ones of previous editions) when there is an alternative like this available is scandalous.

Highest possible recommendation.