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Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, 6th Edition
by F. A. Cotton, G. Wilkinson, C. A. Murillo, and M. Bachmann
Wiley-Interscience: New York, 1999. 1355 pp. ISBN 0-47119957-5. $89.95.
reviewed by Daniel Robinovich
I got hooked on inorganic chemistry reading a battered copy of the second edition in Spanish of "Cotton and Wilkinson". Some 15 years later, here I am, browsing in awe and reviewing the new edition of what is arguably the most popular inorganic chemistry textbook ever published. Now with two additional coauthors, Carlos A. Murillo and Manfred Bochmann, the sixth edition follows previous ones in organization and style but its content has been thoroughly revised.
To keep the book at a reasonable length (not to mention weight!), some basic topics (e.g., structures of solids, VSEPR, Walsh diagrams, hybridization) present in previous editions have been eliminated. There are more than a few currently available introductory inorganic chemistry textbooks, including Cotton and Wilkinson's Basic Inorganic Chemistry, that cover in detail these fundamental aspects of structure and bonding. Since several excellent monographs on bioinorganic chemistry have appeared in the last decade, the entire corresponding chapter (42 pages) in the fifth edition has been reduced to about a page in the sixth. Nevertheless, key biological aspects of vanadium, iron, nickel, copper, zinc,...