This university offers chemistry for nonscience majors and chemistry for everyone else. This text is suitable for the latter group which includes chemistry majors, engineers, prenursing, and premedical students.

This splended text is well designed with a liberal use of color, photographs, and white space. The periodic table has film overlays to assist the student understand the layout of the table as well as the presentation of the element groupings. The reading level and mathematical development is suitable for general chemistry students. The answers to selected problems, glossary, and index are excellent. I worked several problems from each chapter and the correct answers matched mine.

The text coverage is reasonably summarized as a third each introductory and basic material, physical chemistry, and descriptive chemistry. This text represents the completion of a cycle: descriptive chemistry at one time was a major portion of the text (Linus Pauling texts), then general chemistry texts became a series of mathematical problems, next authors added descriptive chemistry in boxes which few students read, and this text completes the circle with an integrated chemistry. The volume is a joy to read.

Problem solving is well developed. The students are guided to think about a problem and to arrive at a "ballpark solutions" using "common sense." Then they are shown the dimensional-analysis approach to reach a proper numerical answer. The logic of problem solving is taught and explained. Nomenclature is well taught in Chapter 2, rather than found only in an Appendix.

Balancing redox reactions is presented using the oxidation-number method as well as the half-reaction method. This approach is important because students come to us having been told one of these methods is superior for all situations or that a third, often more complex, procedure is the way to grind out these results.

There are a few disappointments; however, other instructors prefer these approaches. In Chapter 5 electron configurations stop at the hydrogen-filling order, e.g., [Ar] 4s1 3d5 instead of [Ar] 3d5 4s1 for the ground state of Cr. In Chapter 21, Transition Elements, the students are shown the energy order. I prefer to teach the energy order for the orbitals in the earlier chapter. Several texts teach different molecular orbital diagrams for dinitrogen and dioxygen. The difference is covered in a footnote; however, the orbital similarity of Li2 through N2 as compared to O2 and F2 is lost.

The section on writing Lewis structures is well done; however, better nomenclature is to use the term electron-dot structure instead of Lewis structure for the expanded octet examples. When teaching resonance forms the authors properly avoid resonance forms that formally require forms that require d orbitals and (p-d) pi bonding (1, 2); however, in Chapter 19 sulfuric acid is shown with expanded octet double bonds.

Literature Cited

1. Suidan, L.; Badenhoop, J. K.; Glendening; E. D.; Weinhold, F. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72, 583--586.
2. Straub, D. K. J. Chem. Educ. 1995, 72, 889--891.