Allen and Unwin: Sydney, NSW, Australia, 2000. xix + 588 pp. Figures and tables. ISBN 1-86508-2554. Paperback, $49.95.

Anyone who has taught in a community college has most likely taught at least one continuing education course. Maybe it was a course entitled "How Chemistry Affects Your Everyday Life", in which the instructor pulls out the requisite bottles of ammonia, bleach, peroxide, and boric acid to illustrate how chemistry is all around us. Usually, after the typical session, the participants still know nothing about chemistry and ignore the calls to not mix bleach and ammonia together. Ben Selinger, with nods to two colleagues at the Australian National University, wrote the first edition of Chemistry in the Marketplace in 1973 to combat this problem by making chemistry relevant to the everyday consumer.

The book is divided into 16 chapters, starting with the language of chemistry, moving into occupational health and safety, then covering chemistry in the laundry, boudoir, garden, and medicine cabinet. There are also the standard chapters on energy, radiation, and plastics. Throughout the book, icons mark interesting stories (such as the origin of the Queen Anne gallon used in the USA), experiments, and exercises. (The experiments can be performed in the home using ordinary safety precautions.) For example, I learned from the text that Mountain Dew could not be sold in Australia without having some of the caffeine taken out, as the Australians limit the amount of caffeine in soft drinks (pity me). I also learned about the difference between electricians' solder and plumbers' solder (plumbers' solder is 30/70 tin/lead, does not have a sharp melting point, and takes time to set, whereas 60/40 electricians' solder sets quickly owing to its definite melting point). One semi-humorous information piece entitled "Carrots Kill!" includes this statement: "Among all people born in 1839 who later ate carrots, there has been 100% mortality." Another information piece discusses how one company extracts gold from sewage.

Selinger spent much of his professional life as a consumer advocate with such agencies as the Australian Consumers Association and Worksafe Australia, so he tries to provide information that will better inform consumers about some side effects of chemicals. In the "Chemistry in the Garden" chapter, he discusses the origins of the use of DDT as an insecticide and provides a time line that covers its usage to 1995, by which time it had been phased out for agricultural use. He also provides tables listing the amounts of organochlorines in breast milk in female residents of the Australian state of Victoria and median concentrations of pesticides in adipose tissue in Western Australia. In this chapter, he expresses his opinion that greater development of nonchemical improvements in agriculture over the past 50 years would have better served both industrial and third-world countries today, as disasters such as Bhopal in 1984 would have been less likely to happen. He balances his comment by noting that increases in chemical production were responsible for the dramatic increases in worldwide food production and that banning all chemicals would be a draconian measure. However, Selinger does clearly indicate that he believes herbicide production should be reduced.

Selinger states that he would like the book to be a general reference and it can be used in this way. However, I would also recommend that the book be used as a textbook for a "Chemistry in Society" course, because it includes ample chemical structures, equations, definitions, and concepts in a fashion that introduces chemistry sufficiently to a nonscience major. A person taking a chemistry course using this book would have both a reference and a lab manual in one volume.

The book is well written, and the content will not overwhelm its intended audience. For $50, one can have an acceptable consumer's reference that I feel will not be outdated for a few years. Selinger makes one strong point: we must make chemistry more relevant to our students and give the public fewer "whiz-bang" examples and more content. Chemistry in the Marketplace will go on my bookshelf and will eventually find its way into my classroom.