Journal of Molecular Structure, 189 (1988) 397-400 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfed Book reviews 397 zyxwvutsrqp Modern NMR Spectroscopy: A Guide for Chemists, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUT by Jeremy K.M. Sanders and Brian K. Hunter, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. xii+308, price $35.00 (hard cover); g17.50 (paper). As mentioned in the preface, this book is intended to bridge the gap between NMR spectroscopists continuously inventing more and more pulse techniques (many of them of dubious practical value) and chemists who have interesting molecules and want to study their structure by NMR. It is written by chemists with excellent practical experience in modern pulsed NMR spectroscopy, for chemists who are familiar with the basic principles of proton and carbon-13 NMR (e.g., on the level of the Abraham and Loftus book [ zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcb 1 ] ) and wish to exploit the NMR spectrometer they have access to in a better way, either through the hands of an operator, or by sitting at the instrument themselves. The book is organized in a rather unusual way: there are no separate chap- ters on chemical shifts, spin-spin couplings, etc., traditionally present in al- most any NMR book. The first chapter is devoted to the one-pulse NMR experiment. It introduces some of the ground principles of pulsed NMR on the basis of the vector model which is further used throughout the book. The sec- ond chapter discusses spin decoupling and difference spectroscopy, the latter being one of the specialties of the authors. The third chapter describes the basic multiple pulse experiments, as inversion-recovery, spin-echoes, population transfer and their combination into selective and non-selective polarization transfer (INEPT), etc. The fourth chapter introduces the fundamental two- dimensional NMR techniques: heteronuclear and homonuclear (COSY) shift correlation, J-resolved spectroscopy, multiple-quantum coherence (INADE- QUATE), as well as some more recent techniques such as relay sequences, combined COSY/NOESY, etc. It is also shown how the basic pulse sequences may be combined to design new sequences for specific purposes. Chapters 5,6 and 7 are, in this reviewer’s opinion, the heart of the book: they show how the chemists can use the NMR experiments to establish intra- or intermolecular connections through bonds, space or chemical exchange, thus revealing the molecular structure and/or the reaction pathway. Strong emphasis is put on the strategy to choose the proper combination of one- and two-dimensional techniques, in order to obtain maximum information for a given amount of spectrometer time. This approach is well illustrated in Chapter 10 on the ex- ample of the sucrose octa-acetate molecule. Chapter 8 describes the most pop- ular techniques for editing NMR spectra: decoupled spectra, suppression of broad and solvent peaks, C-13 subspectra separating CH3, CH, and CH signals, etc. Chapter 9 gives an excellent introduction to solid-state NMR, including line-narrowing techniques (magic angle spinning and dipolar decoupling), cross