Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
Chemical Kinetics and Catalysis
by Richard I. Masel
Wiley-Interscience: New York, 2001. 952 pp.
ISBN 0-471-24197-0. $99.95.
reviewed by Richard Pagni
There are many methods, experimental and theoretical,
usually carried out in combination, by which a reaction
mechanism is deduced. Chemical kinetics in all of its guises
perhaps plays the most important role in this task. The sub-
ject, of course, is covered with varying degrees of sophistica-
tion and completeness in most chemistry courses. Hundreds
of books, journals, series, compendia, and dissertations in-
clude the words chemical kinetics or kinetics in their titles.
To this list may be added the comprehensive, up-to-date, and
rigorous textbook under consideration: Chemical Kinetics and
Catalysis by Masel.
The author, who has written a previous book on reac-
tions on solid surfaces, is a researcher in and acknowledged
expert on chemical kinetics and catalysis and teaches courses
on these subjects at the University of Illinois. He has writ-
ten, first and foremost, a textbook for students that also can
be used as a reference book. The author writes in an easy-to-
follow conversational style that students will like. This is an
asset, as the material discussed is often difficult. To assist the
student in learning the material the author has included large
numbers of tables, figures, reactions, and equations in each
chapter. A real asset are the numerous exhaustively worked
out problems at the end of most chapters, which often re-
quire some elementary programming in Excel. There are also
large numbers of unworked problems of varying difficulty
for the students to work out on their own, some of which
require consulting the original literature for information.
There are references at the end of each chapter and the book
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 3 March 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
for further reading, and Masel has developed a Web site to
be used in conjunction with this book.
The book contains 14 chapters, 11 on kinetics and 3 on
catalysis. The topics therein are mostly what one would ex-
pect to find in a book on kinetics and catalysis but include
some unexpected ones such as prediction of reaction mecha-
nisms, solvents as catalysts, the Woodward–Hoffmann rules,
and linear free-energy relationships. The coverage is broad
and detailed and neither experiment nor theory is slighted.
More than 100 pages, for example, are devoted to the im-
portant question of why reactions have activation barriers.
Most topics are introduced historically. I was surprised to learn
how sophisticated kinetics was a century ago, the age in which
the subject became a discipline. Methods developed by the
pioneering kineticists for distinguishing one rate law from
another are still viable today, for example.
The text, as fine as it is, could have been improved by
better proofreading and copyediting. Some of the chemical
structures are poorly or inaccurately drawn and there are
enough errors of all sorts to be irritating. For example, tables
and equations mentioned in the text occasionally don’t match
their actual counterparts. One often repeated error that only
someone living in Tennessee would perhaps notice—and find
amusing—is the reference to S. C. Lind, a distinguished
physical chemist from Tennessee, as S. C. Lund. Bodenstein
and Lind studied the kinetics of the reaction H 2 +
Br2 → 2HBr at the beginning of the 20th century.
The book would make an excellent text for a rigorous
one- or two-semester course in chemical kinetics. Only gradu-
ate and upper-level undergraduate students with a solid back-
ground in physical chemistry would be prepared for such a
course. The book may also serve as a reference for those whose
interest in chemical kinetics and catalysis is peripheral to their
primary teaching and research functions.
Richard Pagni is in the Department of Chemistry, University
of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996-1600; rpagni@utk.edu.
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