This latest volume is the 19th in Jeff Seeman's projected 22-volume series of autobiographies of 20th-century organic chemists that began publication in 1990 (Kauffman, G. B. J. Chem. Educ. 1991, 68, A21). As one of the youngest contributors to the series, Streitwieser was scheduled to be one of the last to be published (Three of the biographeesArthur J. Birch, Melvin Calvin, and Herman Markhave died since the start of the series' publication), and he acknowledges that he has benefited from the feedback to earlier volumes to make additions to his own. For example, Carl Djerassi's inclusion of his daughter's suicide in his volume, Steroids Made It Possible (Kauffman, G. B. Am. Sci. 1992, 80, 190), prompted Streitwieser to include personal details of his first wife's suicide (she jumped from the Oakland Bay Bridge after taking the first dose of a new antidepressant drug) and its effect on his life and that of his children, as well as his chemistry.

Streitwieser chose his book's title because in his chemical life "theory and experiment have interacted so that both were enhanced." With great candor and flashes of humor, he describes his youth, education, marriages and family life, travels, honors and awards, hobbies, his research and that of his colleagues, controversies, and consulting, editorial, and writing activities. He also includes personal reminiscences, anecdotes, and opinions of education, grantsmanship, scientific ethics, creativity, excessive governmental regulations, and future trends in chemistry. His list of 442 references includes some as recent as 1996. An alphabetical appendix of brief biographical information about 63 colleagues and associates (from Roger Adams to Robert W. Zwanzig) and a chemical genealogy, tracing Streitwieser's roots to Adriaan van den Spieghel (1578-1625), are unique to this volume in the "Profiles" series.

Born on June 23, 1927, in Buffalo, New York, Streitwieser shared many of the educational experiences of our generation of chemistsreceiving a chemistry set at an early age and setting up a home laboratory, training at an academically elite high school, and winning the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Together with childhood chums Lester Friedman and Edward M. Kosower (now chemistry professors at Case-Western Reserve and Tel Aviv Universities, respectively), he founded a three-way partnership, "Organic Specialties", complete with letterhead stationery that enabled the partners to obtain free samples and receive orders for syntheses from chemical companies. While he was still attending Stuyvesant High School, his first publication, "Chlorination of Fluorene with Sulfuryl Chloride", appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Streitwieser completed his undergraduate education at Columbia College in three and a half years (1945-1948), which included a year and a half in the U.S. Army. Aided by the G.I. Bill, he remained at Columbia, working on a solvolysis problem under William von Eggers Doering and earning his M.A. (1950) and Ph.D. (1952) degrees. After working as an Atomic Energy Commission postdoctoral fellow with John D. Roberts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1951-1952), he joined the University of California, Berkeley, faculty, rising through the ranks and officially retiring in 1992. (In his words, "I became 'emeritus;' I am not really retired.")

During his long and productive career as one of today's most prominent physical organic chemists, Streitwieser made many contributions, which he describes lucidly with extensive use of structural formulas, equations, and figures. More than 200 undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and visiting professors (many of whom are shown in the 99 formal and informal photographs in the book) have worked with him through four decades. Their problems have encompassed reaction mechanisms; solvolytic displacement reactions; stereochemistry of the primary carbon atom; secondary deuterium isotope effects; molecular orbital theory (the subject of his first book [1961], which helped to educate a new generation of organic chemists in the use of MO concepts); carbon acidity (kinetic and equilibrium acidities in cyclohexylamine, Brönsted correlations, organofluorine carbanions, and carbanions in tetrahydrofuran); theoretical chemistry (computers and MO theory, ab initio quantum organic chemistry, electron density functions, carboxylate resonance, and transition states and ion-pair reactions); f-orbital organometallics (uranoceneabout whose discovery Robert B. Woodward exclaimed, "I wish I had thought of that", cerocene, organolanthanides, and structures and hydrolysis); heterocycle polycations; and organic plasma chemistry.

Streitwieser's entertaining, informative, and modestly priced volume will be of interest to both present and future generations of students and instructors of chemistry courses and the history of science as well as to all persons concerned with the human aspects of science.