Organic Mechanisms Reactions, Stereochemistry and Synthesis

This book (Organic Mechanisms Reactions, Stereochemistry, and Synthesis) is an attempt to amalgamate physical, mechanistic, and synthetic organic chemistry. It is written by a synthetic organic chemist who happens to also think deeply about the mechanism and understands the importance of knowledge structure and reactivity in synthetic organic chemistry. I helped get the first German edition of this book translated into English for two reasons. First, Reinhard Bruckner has been a friend of mine for over twenty years, ever since we were postdocs in the Wender group in the mid-80s. He was a study in teutonic determination and efficiency, and I and a few other Americans, and one Frenchman in particular, have been trying to cure him of that, with some success, I might add, though he remains an extremely dedicated and hard-working educator and scientist. That’s a good thing. Second, I especially liked the project because I liked the book, and I thought Reinhard’s way of dealing with synthesis and mechanism together was an approach sufficiently different that it might be the “whack on the side of the head” that could be useful in generating new thought patterns in students of organic chemistry. Well, I was actually a bit surprised to be invited to work on the English translation of the 3rd German edition of the book...