"Organic Chemistry Principles in Context: A Story Telling Historical Approach" takes a path that is a radical departure from the way all other textbooks of this subject are written. The principles of organic chemistry are discovered by investigation of the complex phenomena that arise from application of these principles, crossing the spectrum from the academic to the biological to the industrial. All the fundamental principles of organic chemistry normally presented in an undergraduate one year organic chemistry course are found in this book in the context of the stories and the people involved in their discovery. The students who have used this book have found it to be an attractive and effective method of learning organic chemistry. The teachers of the subject have found that the book enhances their own appreciation and love of the subject. The author of the book, Professor Mark M. Green, has organized a free access web site with a link to the answers to all of the problems at the end of every section of the book. In addition this web site, OrganicChemistryPrinciplesinContext.com, has links to explanatory video lectures made by Professor Green for each of the book's twelve chapters.
About the Author: Mark M. Green is a 1958 graduate of the City College of New York. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University working with Kurt Mislow followed by a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship with Carl Djerassi at Stanford University. He served as professor of chemistry at several universities with long experience in teaching organic chemistry to students of widely varying abilities. He has been at his current position at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University since 1980. Professor Green's over 40 year career of academic research has been widely recognized. He was awarded a National Science Foundation "Special Creativity Award" in 1995, elected chair wof the Polymer Chemistry Gordon Conference for the year 2000, elected a "Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science" in 2003 and was named a winner of the Society of Polymer Science of Japan award for "Outstanding Achievement in Polymer Science and Technology" in 2005. He has been elected as a "Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science" for "pioneering work in important new areas of polymer science." He serves on the editorial board of "Topics in Stereochemistry," and has served on the editorial board of the American Chemical Society journal "Macromolecules." Professor Green received a Jacobs' Excellence in Teaching Award by the Polytechnic Institute of NYU in 2006. His interest in communicating science to general audiences has led to several years of writing columns for two newspapers, which are published in a blog, sciencefromaway.com. In recent years Professor Green has turned his attention to further developing his long interest in teaching organic chemistry in context by using a story-telling historical approach. His first book, Organic Chemistry Principles and Industrial Practice (2003 Wiley-VCH) written with Harold A. Wittcoff, has been widely praised as a resource for chemistry teachers seeking material to enhance their classes and has been used as a text for both chemical engineering students studying beginning organic chemistry as well as for graduate courses in the chemical sciences. Books Co-Authored and Co-Edited: Organic Chemistry Principles and Industrial Practice, Mark M. Green and Harold A. Wittcoff, Wiley-VCH, 2003. Materials-Chirality, edited by Mark M. Green, Roeland Nolte and Bert Meijer, Volume 24 in the series, Topics in Stereochemistry, Wiley-Interscience, 2003. Popular Science Articles: Sciencefromaway.com