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An Introduction to Hydrogen Bonding George A. Jeffrey. Oxford University Press: New York, 1997. 303+ pp. ISBN 0-19-509549-9. $29.95.
Modern publishers prefer to direct books toward specific target markets, and this book is said to be aimed at the undergraduate senior or beginning graduate student special topics course on hydrogen bonding. Whether there really are many such courses and whether this book would serve as a textbook is debatable. On the other hand, it will be a valuable reference for all chemists interested in hydrogen bonding in structural chemistry, supermolecular chemistry, and biomolecular recognition. It has long been a tradition in scholarship for a master to put together a general treatment of the topic that was the focus of his or her career. An understanding of the special relationships among otherwise diverse observations becomes apparent only through prolonged attention and it is good to pass this perspective to future scholars. What better reason can a book have for its existence?
The book begins with a brief (too brief?) historical perspective on hydrogen bonding. This is followed by a chapter describing various modern theoretical descriptions of hydrogen bonds, including the Morokuma decomposition of H-bond energies into contributing attractive and repulsive terms and descriptions of H-bond potential energy...