Lewis Press: Boca Raton, FL, 1999. 80 pp. ISBN 1-56670-516-9. $39.95.

One commonly cited shortcoming of undergraduate and graduate chemical education is that it poorly prepares students for the types of problems they will encounter in today's industrial and service labs. A quick scan of the job listings in Chemical and Engineering News, for example, shows that there is a significant demand for chemists with a working knowledge of QA/QC (quality assurance and quality control), cGMP (current Good Manufacturing Practices), and the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 9000 series standards.

Those of us who teach analytical chemistry know that these topics do not find their way into many traditional analytical textbooks or curricula. With this primer, John Kenkel seeks to fill this gap by providing a brief but thorough introduction to the principles of quality assurance and quality control. Although only 80 pages in length, Kenkel's book includes a wealth of information, with chapters covering statistics, quality assurance, sampling, good laboratory practices, and quality audits. The text is written in a lively style (no small feat when covering a dense and acronym-loaded field such as federal regulations) and uses practical examples to which the reader can easily relate. A short but useful bibliography is included, as is a set of homework exercises. Future editions would benefit from a glossary for the more than 30 acronyms used in the text, and from a list of regulatory Web sites.

Kenkel's treatment of this subject is at its best when discussing the steps involved in a quality assurance program (Chapter 5) and good laboratory practices (Chapter 7). Topics such as standard operating procedures, calibration and standardization, reference materials, control charts, method development, proficiency testing, validation, chain of custody, and laboratory staff and facilities are covered in sufficient detail that their importance can be appreciated. The interplay between federal regulations and laboratory operations is especially evident throughout these chapters.

The material on statistics (Chapter 4) and sampling (Chapter 6) is less satisfying. This isn't surprising, given that the author focuses more on describing the necessary steps for achieving quality than on the, sometimes, intricate details of how one actually carries out these steps. Thus, for example, Kenkel shows how to calculate the mean, standard deviation, and confidence interval for a data set, but does not discuss their use in checking for the presence of determinate error or in proficiency testing. Another example: in connection with sampling, Kenkel discusses the relationships between the number of samples to be analyzed, the number of times each sample should be analyzed, and the variances in both sampling and the analysis. Exactly how an analyst decides on the number of samples to collect and the number of replicate analyses to be performed is left unanswered.

In the preface, Kenkel notes this primer is intended for students interested in a career in the chemical process industry and as a quick reference for new employees. As a textbook, the primer is suitable for technical degree programs specifically designed to prepare students for industrial analytical labs. As a supplemental text for undergraduate courses in analytical chemistry, it is less useful. The lack of specific "how to" details seriously limits its utility in a course serving students with a diverse array of career interests. Newly employed analytical chemists will find this primer to be of immense benefit as they adjust to an industrial laboratory's increased emphasis on quality and to the interactions between their laboratory and federal regulations.