Catch up chemistry: for the life and medical sciences
Mitch Fry and Elizabeth Page
Bloxham: Scion 2005 2005 | Pp190 | £14.99 each | ISBN1 904 84210 0
Reviewed by Clive Bullock

Successful books in this market tend to focus on the essential chemical concepts and provide enough biological context to add interest and explain why the topics are important. They also need to be cheap and useful enough for students to have on their shelves as an indispensable crib throughout their studies. Judged against these criteria, Catch up chemistry: for the life and medical sciences fares pretty well. 

Readers are led through the traditional introduction to elements, atoms and molecules, bonding and the Periodic Table and on to stereochemistry, biomolecules and then to thermodynamics, kinetics and chemical reactivity, all heavily illustrated and explained via biological or environmental examples. A no-nonsense guide to dealing with units, moles, dilutions etc is included. There is no attempt to ‘dumb down’ here; just clear definitions and practical advice on how to tackle typical calculations needed for laboratory exercises. There are good summaries at the end of each chapter and ‘taking it further’ sections to add interest for more confident readers. Figures are pleasingly uncluttered and clarity is aided by the simple black and white format. Less is definitely more here. 

Acidity and pH are carefully integrated into the chapter Water – the solvent of life. However, sections on other more technical topics, such as redox systems, will still cause many students to struggle, despite heroic efforts to emphasise the biological examples. Unusually organic reaction mechanisms do not appear until the last chapter, disguised as The reactivity of biological molecules, and it might have been more logical to link this topic with bonding in earlier chapters. 

One complaint and one omission: there is no attempt to discourage the use of the old-fashioned ‘M’ rather than moll^–1 or moldm^–3; and there is nothing on osmotic concentration units (osmoles), which is an essential preamble to an understanding of water and electrolyte balance.

Overall, Catch up chemistry: for the lifeand medical sciences achieves its objectives. This book should become required reading for any first-year ‘chemistry for life sciences’ undergraduate course, and a good reference source thereafter.