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Handbook of Polycyclic Hydrocarbons. Part b, Polycyclic Isomers and Heteroatom Analogs of Benzenoid Hydrocarbons
Journal of Molecular Structure, 239 (1990) 315-322 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam
315
Book Reviews Handbook of Polycyclic Hydrocarbons. Part B, Polycyclic Isomers and Heteroatom Analogs of Benzenoid Hydrocarbons, by J.R. Dias; Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, Oxford, New York, Tokyo, 1988, (Physical Science Data 30)) pp. xiv + 404, price US $155.25/Dfl. 295.00. This is part B of a two-volume work that aims to bring together all known benzenoid hydrocarbons, their polycyclic isomers and hetero-analogues, and to organise them into isomeric and other groups according to what the author calls “a formula periodic table” based on graph-theoretical principles. The work is produced, from typescript, by the so-called “camera-ready-copy” process. The book is in English, but British readers may find its prose at best inelegant, some American readers might have occasional difficulties and those who know only standard English as a second language will have a high probability of finding its style incomprehensible in a large number of places. Reading the book, I was very much put in mind of what the British newspaper The Guardian used to call ‘Haig-speak’, after the United States Secretary of State of the day, of whom it used to be said that he “... noun-ized verbs and verb-ized nouns.“! It also recalled for me Oscar Wilde’s famous jibe that Britain and the United States are “ ...two countries divided by a common language”! So many sentences in the book are written in that verbose, grandiose ‘jargon’-style of American English that is all too frequently met with these days, even on this side of the Atlantic, and which does little credit or justice to the language that is widely acknowledged to have one of the richest vocabularies of any tongue. Again and again, as I read the book, there was a burgeoning number of sentences and phrases about which I kept asking myself, with steadily increasing frustration: “What does it actually mean?” As far as the scientific and mathematical content is concerned, there is, in several places, a slackness of notation that is unfortunate: for example, on page 9, the use of the symbol ‘e’ to denote both ‘an edge’ and ‘the number of edges’ within a few lines of text is a potential source of confusion, and the fact that the word ‘circuit’ is undefined when used in the definition of ‘cycle graph’ on page 10 is clearly somewhat unsatisfactory. On page 13, the given definitions of the adjectives ‘additive’, ‘constantive ‘, ‘multiplicative’ and ‘derivative’ were clear and rigorous but then the author spoils it all by referring to “size-extensive scalar quantities” (whatever they are) and, for good measure, adds the sentence: “These properties are size-consistent relative to one another via normalization” which, in the context, I could not understand at all; the rest of that paragraph - until that point, clear - was likewise incomprehensible to me. On page 14, the use of the word ‘factor’ to mean an element of a matrix was something that I had not met before, while, more importantly, after an account of
316
how weighted graphs are arrived at, the definition which follows is that specifically for a graph without weighted edges or vertices - thus contradicting the previous line! As one who spends his life trying to convince mathematics pupils that a vector is a different animal, mathematically speaking, from a coordinate, I take exception to an ‘equals’ sign’s being placed (on page 15) between ‘ ’ and ‘ (1, - 1)‘. On page 16, the ‘pairing theorem’
is referred to without
further elaboration - but only for the reader to be told that it does not apply in the case under consideration! Concerning applications, the only area covered in ‘Spectroscopy’ (Chapter 4) in which I would claim to have some specific expertise - namely, the NMR spectra of benzenoid molecules - merits only nine non-commital lines on page 67; the so-called “ring-current” effect, on which there is a vast literature, receives no mention at all. Perhaps the least subjective, and most damning, criticism that may be levelled at the book is the sheer paucity of actual information contained in many of its tabulated pages. Nearly 270 of the 404 pages it comprises bear molecular data (at the rate of two compounds per page) presented under a dozen or more separate headings. Each of these headings is laboriously reprinted for every one of the 500 or so molecules listed. If no information is available under a particular heading for a given molecule, no entry is, accordingly, made there and, on a disturbingly large number of occasions, no data at all are in fact filled in! About 35 of these half-page entries are entirely devoid of any information whatsoever - even a printed structural formula! These latter amount to some 6% of the tabulated molecular data and about 4% of the whole book - which, the reader may be reminded, costs nearly D5 Sterling (at current rates of exchange). I do not believe that this state of affairs would have been found acceptable if the manuscript had been submitted for publication in a refereed journal, rather than floated as a specialist monograph emanating from a commercial publisher. The blurb for the book states that “ . ..analytical. organic, synthetic and theoretical chemists working in the environmental and petroleum fields will find this reference an indispensible source of information.” Not being in this specific area myself I find it hard to assess how valid this claim is but, in view of my comments, above, I have considerable doubts about it. I am above all just left feeling rather sad that an author who quite possibly has things potentially of interest to say fails to communicate them to me when he is using my own (and, presumably, his own) language. R.B.M.
315
Book Reviews Handbook of Polycyclic Hydrocarbons. Part B, Polycyclic Isomers and Heteroatom Analogs of Benzenoid Hydrocarbons, by J.R. Dias; Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, Oxford, New York, Tokyo, 1988, (Physical Science Data 30)) pp. xiv + 404, price US $155.25/Dfl. 295.00. This is part B of a two-volume work that aims to bring together all known benzenoid hydrocarbons, their polycyclic isomers and hetero-analogues, and to organise them into isomeric and other groups according to what the author calls “a formula periodic table” based on graph-theoretical principles. The work is produced, from typescript, by the so-called “camera-ready-copy” process. The book is in English, but British readers may find its prose at best inelegant, some American readers might have occasional difficulties and those who know only standard English as a second language will have a high probability of finding its style incomprehensible in a large number of places. Reading the book, I was very much put in mind of what the British newspaper The Guardian used to call ‘Haig-speak’, after the United States Secretary of State of the day, of whom it used to be said that he “... noun-ized verbs and verb-ized nouns.“! It also recalled for me Oscar Wilde’s famous jibe that Britain and the United States are “ ...two countries divided by a common language”! So many sentences in the book are written in that verbose, grandiose ‘jargon’-style of American English that is all too frequently met with these days, even on this side of the Atlantic, and which does little credit or justice to the language that is widely acknowledged to have one of the richest vocabularies of any tongue. Again and again, as I read the book, there was a burgeoning number of sentences and phrases about which I kept asking myself, with steadily increasing frustration: “What does it actually mean?” As far as the scientific and mathematical content is concerned, there is, in several places, a slackness of notation that is unfortunate: for example, on page 9, the use of the symbol ‘e’ to denote both ‘an edge’ and ‘the number of edges’ within a few lines of text is a potential source of confusion, and the fact that the word ‘circuit’ is undefined when used in the definition of ‘cycle graph’ on page 10 is clearly somewhat unsatisfactory. On page 13, the given definitions of the adjectives ‘additive’, ‘constantive ‘, ‘multiplicative’ and ‘derivative’ were clear and rigorous but then the author spoils it all by referring to “size-extensive scalar quantities” (whatever they are) and, for good measure, adds the sentence: “These properties are size-consistent relative to one another via normalization” which, in the context, I could not understand at all; the rest of that paragraph - until that point, clear - was likewise incomprehensible to me. On page 14, the use of the word ‘factor’ to mean an element of a matrix was something that I had not met before, while, more importantly, after an account of
316
how weighted graphs are arrived at, the definition which follows is that specifically for a graph without weighted edges or vertices - thus contradicting the previous line! As one who spends his life trying to convince mathematics pupils that a vector is a different animal, mathematically speaking, from a coordinate, I take exception to an ‘equals’ sign’s being placed (on page 15) between ‘ ’ and ‘ (1, - 1)‘. On page 16, the ‘pairing theorem’
is referred to without
further elaboration - but only for the reader to be told that it does not apply in the case under consideration! Concerning applications, the only area covered in ‘Spectroscopy’ (Chapter 4) in which I would claim to have some specific expertise - namely, the NMR spectra of benzenoid molecules - merits only nine non-commital lines on page 67; the so-called “ring-current” effect, on which there is a vast literature, receives no mention at all. Perhaps the least subjective, and most damning, criticism that may be levelled at the book is the sheer paucity of actual information contained in many of its tabulated pages. Nearly 270 of the 404 pages it comprises bear molecular data (at the rate of two compounds per page) presented under a dozen or more separate headings. Each of these headings is laboriously reprinted for every one of the 500 or so molecules listed. If no information is available under a particular heading for a given molecule, no entry is, accordingly, made there and, on a disturbingly large number of occasions, no data at all are in fact filled in! About 35 of these half-page entries are entirely devoid of any information whatsoever - even a printed structural formula! These latter amount to some 6% of the tabulated molecular data and about 4% of the whole book - which, the reader may be reminded, costs nearly D5 Sterling (at current rates of exchange). I do not believe that this state of affairs would have been found acceptable if the manuscript had been submitted for publication in a refereed journal, rather than floated as a specialist monograph emanating from a commercial publisher. The blurb for the book states that “ . ..analytical. organic, synthetic and theoretical chemists working in the environmental and petroleum fields will find this reference an indispensible source of information.” Not being in this specific area myself I find it hard to assess how valid this claim is but, in view of my comments, above, I have considerable doubts about it. I am above all just left feeling rather sad that an author who quite possibly has things potentially of interest to say fails to communicate them to me when he is using my own (and, presumably, his own) language. R.B.M.