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Students of chemistry are not hard-pressed to fi nd a text to support their learning in organic
chemistry through their years at university. The shelves of a university bookshop will usually
offer a choice of at least half a dozen—all entitled ‘Organic Chemistry’, all with substantially
more than 1000 pages. Closer inspection of these titles quickly disappoints expectations of
variety. Almost without exception, general organic chemistry texts have been written to
accompany traditional American sophomore courses, with their rather precisely defi ned
requirements. This has left the authors of these books little scope for reinvigorating their
presentation of chemistry with new ideas.
We wanted to write a book whose structure grows from the development of ideas rather
than being dictated by the sequential presentation of facts. We believe that students benefi t
most of all from a book which leads from familiar concepts to unfamiliar ones, not just
encouraging them to know but to understand and to understand why. We were spurred on by
the nature of the best modern university chemistry courses, which themselves follow this
pattern: this is after all how science itself develops. We also knew that if we did this we could,
from the start, relate the chemistry we were talking about to the two most important sorts of
chemistry that exist—the chemistry that is known as life, and the chemistry as practised by
chemists solving real problems in laboratories.
We aimed at an approach which would make sense to and appeal to today’s students