What is Chemistry?

Nature Atkins wins his readers' attention simply through an elegant and lucid description of the subject he loves.

Philip Ball, Nature Chemistry [T]he result is pretty much unimprovable. Recommending that every chemistry student in the world read a book by Peter Atkins feels a bit like recommending that everyone buy their books from Amazon. But what can you do? If this book had existed when I was an undergraduate, I'd have benefited tremendously. Now you can.

R. E. Buntrock, Choice, This is an excellent presentation, especially for laypeople and high school students or for a 'chemistry for poets' course. Highly recommended.

Montserrat Gomez, University of Toulouse It is an important supplementary book for undergraduate students in Chemistry, [and] integrates the main Chemistry concepts in an easy and fast reading.

<br>Peter Atkins is Fellow of Lincoln College, University of Oxford. He is the author of almost 60 books, which include the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry (published in its ninth edition in November 2009). His other textbooks include Inorganic Chemistry: Chemical Principles and MolecularQuantum Mechanics. He has also written a number of books for a general readership, including Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, The Periodic Kingdom, Molecules, and The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction. He has been a visiting professor in France, Israel, New Zealand, and China, and continues to lecture widely throughout the world.<br>

Preface ; 1. Its origins, scope, and organization ; 2. Its principles: atoms and molecules ; 3. Its principles: energy and entropy ; 4. Its reactions ; 5. Its techniques ; 6. Its achievements ; 7. Its future ; Glossary ; Index