Conceptual chemistry (2nd edn)
John Suchocki
Harlow: Pearson Education 2004 | Pp713 | £43.23 | ISBN0 805 33228 6
Reviewed by Ben Faust

This attractive, colourful hardback book contains a wide range of illustrations, examples and questions. Included with the book is a CD-ROM and a chart listing the tutorials and videos to accompany each chapter. A website (The chemistry place) designed to aid students completes the resource package. However, I find it hard to envisage how this American text would be used in the British education system. The approach is based on concepts, with very little emphasis on calculations. The material covered ranges from GCSE (eg balancing equations and extraction of iron) to A-level and beyond (eg atomic orbitals and protein structure). 

The first 12 chapters cover basic concepts and are followed by seven topical chapters, eg The chemistry of drugs and Optimizing food production. Each chapter includes concept checks (basically questions and answers) and hands-on activities, which include some appropriate distance-learning tasks involving household materials as well as class-based practicals. In some chapters there are calculations in which problems are followed by answers (the problems require knowledge of fractions, percentages and simple algebra only). At the end of each chapter is an ‘In Perspective’ section. This includes terms and definitions, review questions, extension material to the hands-on activities, and exercises designed to stimulate critical thinking (answers to odd-numbered questions only are given in an appendix), as well as further problems in selected chapters. 

I found some of the material inappropriate to my own teaching – the hands-on activities and the calculations, for instance, as well as questions such as ‘Which of the sciences (chemistry, biology or physics) is the most complex?’. However, the historical account of atomic theory is both colourful and informative. I was not impressed by a diagram of a balloon of hydrogen resting on kitchen scales and registering a mass. 

While some of the applications discussed are interesting, teachers thinking of buying this resource should be aware that inorganic group chemistry and organic mechanisms (organic chemistry is covered in just 32 pages) are omitted. The coverage of ionisation energy is not be good enough for the AS-level either.