Organic Chemistry Principles in Context: A Story Telling Historical Approach by Mark M Green

Description

“Organic Chemistry Principles in Context: A Story Telling Historical Approach” takes a path that is a radical departure from the way all other textbooks of this subject are written. The principles of organic chemistry are discovered by investigation of the complex phenomena that arise from application of these principles, crossing the spectrum from the academic to the biological to the industrial. All the fundamental principles of organic chemistry normally presented in an undergraduate one year organic chemistry course are found in this book in the context of the stories and the people involved in their discovery. The students who have used this book have found it to be an attractive and effective method of learning organic chemistry. The teachers of the subject have found that the book enhances their own appreciation and love of the subject. The comments of experts follow: “This book is like no other organic chemistry textbook. Principles in Context is a creative and daring approach to teaching organic chemistry, and it might just be the way to get our students intrigued about the subject.” Jeffrey Moore, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign “This is a marvelous piece of work. It looks like the author is taking an unconventional approach to teaching chemistry, but as he explains in the preface to this book, it is in fact a very natural one. It is the way by which we make ourselves familiar with new things: we hear about it, become interested and go deeper into it. I hope that this book will be brought to the attention of many teachers all over the world. The students deserve it.” Roeland Nolte, Royal Netherlands Academy of Science Professor Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands “This is the most interesting organic chemistry textbook I have read since my days as an undergraduate student. It weaves together all of the fundamentals of organic chemistry into stories/problems of relevance to society, with an eye on the historical development of the field. I would love to use this book to teach chemistry majors and honors students. I learned a lot from this truly unique approach to teaching organic chemistry.” David Hart, Department of Chemistry, Ohio State University “I think you have done something really interesting; so much so that I read it with much more care than I might have. I found myself caught up in seeing how you managed to get (nearly) everything into the book in a most unusual order.” Ian Fleming, Cambridge University, United Kingdom “Congratulations – a masterwork. I would have liked to learn organic chemistry through such a book. I fully share with you the opinion that teaching science through history is the most logical way to attract the interest of the beginners in the field and to show them how discoveries are made.” Meir Lahav, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel