This short book generally achieves its stated purpose, which is to fill a "need for a textbook at an intermediate level of complexity-one which would provide a systematic and efficient treatment of those portions of NMR theory most needed for the intelligent and efficient utilization of the technique in various branches of chemistry and yet one which would avoid the mathematical detail presented in the several excellent treatises on the subject."
Its author, Edwin D. Becker of the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Arthritis, Metabolism and Digestive Diseases, is an accomplished expert in the development and refinement of NMR methods. Hence, quite appropriately, this book is strongly oriented toward methodology and pitfalls, with some cogent examples of applications in the text, but with most applications presented as problems at the end of each chapter. The applications are largely limited to the determination of structures and properties of organic molecules, but many of these examples can be extended, with imagination, to biochemical problems as well.
The excellent introductory (1) and theoretical (2) chapters whet the reader's appetite for what is to follow. Chapter 3, on instrumentation, and Chapter 13, on the use of NMR in quantitative analysis, provide much valuable practical information for alI users of NMR. The chapters on chemical shifts (4) and spin-spin interactions (5) are well written, providing the reader with a physical feeling for the bases of these important phenomena. Figures depicting ranges of chemical shifts for various functional groups are quite comprehensive not only for protons but also for 13C, "N and lsN, I'O, lsF, and 31P. Tables of coupling constants, appropriately, are more illustrative than comprehensive. Chapters 6 and 7 on the analysis of NMR spectra are among the best in this book. Chapter 6 provides a valuable systematic lO-step approach to the interpretation of NMR spectra, but limits itself to protons and I%!. Chapter 7 delves into the quantum mechanical formalisms needed to understand and interpret complex spectra, although some of the complexities may well be removed, at present,