| By the authors’ own admission, Valency and Bonding is a graduate text, but undergraduates considering graduate school in disciplines involving bonding theory should go ahead and obtain a copy. Although the number of equations and the size of the book make the text look daunting, it is the intent of the authors to provide those in the field with something a little different: a text that is both visually stimulating and mathematically rigorous. This book tries to marry the world of the chemist who does a bond strength analysis on the back of a napkin with the world of chemist who does the same analysis using the highest levels of ab initio theory on a supercomputer. Some think that this book is similar to Pauling’s The Nature of the Chemical Bond (1). While this is partly true, a better classification would be a hybrid between Pauling’s book and Szabo and Ostlund’s, Modern Quantum Chemistry (2).
While it is a large book, there are only five chapter divisions. The first chapter is entirely devoted to the theoretical background and is packed nicely into 44 pages. It is a high-level overview of bonding theory. Chapter two considers Electrostatic and Ionic Bonding; this is another short chapter of only 43 pages. The meat of the book appears in Chapters 3 and 4, with Chapter 3 being devoted to molecular bonding in s/p-block elements and chapter 4 to molecular bonding in d-block elements. These are rich chapters with all of the major concepts covered well: aromaticity, polar-covalent bonding, hyperconjugation, metal-ligand bonding, etc. These chapters are full of tables, graphs, charts, structures, and contour plots derived from explicit calculations or experimental results. The natural bond order (NBO) method is used heavily throughout the text. The final chapter is devoted solely to supramolecular bonding. While the section in this chapter on intermolecular forces was expected, the section on transition states initially seemed out of place. The authors, however, take a slightly different perspective on this topic, and it works well with the other chapter material. The book also contains three appendices: one on various theoretical methods, a second on chemical periodicity, the third on units.
For those who want to use this book in a classroom setting, the chapters contain example problems and solutions interspersed within the text to help students master the concepts or learn how to rationalize the results of calculations. The book is written well and the text flows smoothly. The developmental history of modern bonding theory is presented in tandem with the topics, and many photographs of the people responsible for modern quantum chemical methods are found in the text. Extensive notes are found at the end of each chapter. The book contains a chemical species index, an author index, and a subject index.
This is an important book. It is worth a look if for no other reason than to witness outstanding scholarship. There are few texts that successfully incorporate so much data into the presentation of ideas. This text does it masterfully.
Literature Cited
- Pauling, Linus The Nature of the Chemical Bond. 3rd ed.; Cornell University Press: New York, 1960.
- Szabo, Attila; Ostlund, Neil S. Modern Quantum Chemistry: Introduction to Advanced Electronic Structure Theory; McGraw-Hill: New York, 1989.
| 
