Geochemistry - 9780470656679

William M. White (earth and atmospheric sciences, Cornell U.) has written this new textbook on geochemistry, which is nicely packaged by Wiley-Blackwell. It is highly illustrated with single-color diagrams. The many figures are printed at sizes slightly small for best resolution, but the book comes with a companion website that offers powerpoints of all figures, pdf files of all tables, and instructor resources for teaching the book. The author is an experienced geochemist and an ISI highly cited author in technical papers. This book is a first edition and has not yet entirely mastered the difficult art of the best textbook prose, which explains complex ideas using simple language with a flawless sense of sequence and rhythm, and keeps faith in the reader's intelligence. There is some variance in tone here between the extremely elementary and the elaborately technical. White is a skilled academic writer who has conciously simplified his style. This style is excellent at illustrating ideas by taking readers through technical examples, however, and these compose most of the book. The structure is sound, and when prose sections do come, they are well chosen (the introduction gives a short review of the history of geochemistry, for instance.) The majority of the book is physical geochemistry: several chapters of thermodynamics, then kinetics, physical chemistry, and trace element and isotope geochemistry. The shorter second section is more narrative, and focuses on historical geochemistry: history of the solar system, structure of the earth, and the earth's organic and atmospheric systems. As a textbook, it will be best for upper-division undergraduate geology and chemistry majors, who will be the primary users. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)