Horwood: Chichester, UK, 1999. 304 pp. ISBN 1-898563-60-8. $45.00.

The title--and perhaps even more, the "About the Author" section in the front of the book--reveals the spirit of this text. As I read the book, I got the feeling that the author was looking over my shoulder making certain that I understood the concepts. Fundamentals of Chemical Kinetics is just that: it briefly goes into the modern theories of kinetics. It does not touch on the forefront of kinetics research, nor does it go into the experimental aspects.

The author did an excellent job with her chosen task. The theories are clearly explained. Some of the chapters end with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each topic. Many of the "weaknesses" are addressed in the following chapter, so there is a natural flow of ideas. The results of each theory are compared to experimental data. The mathematical derivations are straightforward and complement the text. There are many figures, such as potential energy curves and trajectory diagrams, to help illustrate the concepts.

This book is aimed at upper-level undergraduate students or beginning graduate students. Marginal undergraduate students would have difficulty with this material, so I would tend to use this book in a graduate class. Readers of the book are expected to be familiar with statistical mechanics. In fact, a student who has successfully completed a course in statistical mechanics shouldn't have much trouble with this text.

I would use this text in my class, with two reservations. There are no problems in this text. If this were the sole text for the class, the instructor would have to provide problems for the students. This text might best fit as a supplementary text for a kinetics course. The second reservation is that the text has no references. General chemistry texts rarely have many references because the material has passed into the "public domain", and the same could be said here. It would be nice to see where the experimental data came from. From a historical perspective, it might be interesting to go back and see some of the original papers for the various theories.