Magnetic resonance, Invited Lectures presented at the IVth International Symposium on Magnetic Resonance, Rehovot, Israel, 23rd to 31st August 1971, edited by D. Fiat, Butterworths, London, 1973, pp. 339. £ 11.00
✍ Scribed by R. J. Abraham
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1973
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 134 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0749-1581
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
THIS book consists of 26 of the three Plenary and 36 invited lectures given at the fourth International Symposium on Magnetic Resonance held in Rehovot and Jerusalem in August, 1971. It is in the usual pleasing style of these I.U.P.A.C. books.
One lecture consists of a reminiscence of the discovery of NMR by Professor Bloch which made fascinating and delightful reading. The other 25 span the very broad field of NMR with more emphasis on the physical side.
A rough classification gave one biologically applied lecture, three chemical ones, ten chemical-physics and eleven physics lectures, from which many readers of OMR will conclude they need read no further! This would be in general a hasty conclusion as even a handful of first-rate, substantial and original lectures are well worth having at hand. However, the lectures given here, although well-written, do not in general fulfil the second two criteria. In particular many of the participants (to my mind very reasonably) appear to have felt that having given the lectures, which were of a high standard and written up the subject material for journal presentation, only a brief account was required here. Thus of the 25 lectures only seven are of more than 14 pages (including figures and references). Also more importantly nearly all the subject matter covered has already appeared in the press.
However, such books can still perform a useful function by collecting under one cover a substantial section of a given research topic. For example, the similar report of the plenary lectures of the I.U.P.A.C. conference on Conformational Analysis is a useful publication, consisting as it does of lectures virtually all of which are relevant to almost everyone working in this field. This is in direct contrast to the book under review as most NMR chemists have very little interest in, for example, the physics of the solid state, also, of course, investigated by NMR techniques.
The distinction is clearly seen to be between a subject oriented conference, in which the common theme unifies the participants and a technique oriented one which almost invariably diverges from a common origin. This leads me to conclude that the uncritical publication of virtually all conference material, which is tending to occur these days, is not an unmixed blessing.
Certainly it is difficult to recommend this book for any individual purchaser, particularly at the purchase price of 511.00, and indeed to most libraries of limited funds. However, if one has 511.00 to spare, then I would recommend as being of particular interest to the chemist the articles by H. J. Bernstein (solvent effects); H. G. Hertz (Nuclear Relaxation in Liquid Mixtures), J. J. Katz (lH on deuterated bio-molecules); D. Kivelson (ESR and molecular motion in liquids) and S. K. Rengan et al. (ESR relaxation in organic free radicals) and, of course, Professor Bloch's introduction.