Introduction

The book describes an overview of the various arylation methods under metal-catalysed conditions. There are nine chapters covering about 500 pages which are:

A Modern Approach

This book came after Lutz Ackermann’s (Georg-August-Universität Institut für Organische und Biomolekulare Chemie, Germany) 2009 book (1) by the same publisher. It is interesting to note that Marko Hapke wrote reviews on these two books (2, 3) in which he compared how this book is different, hence we don’t intend to make any comparisons to avoid duplication.

We are delighted to observe that in Chapter 1, the authors copied the chart (Figure 1.1) from our review (4) to include the already existing information, rather than replicating the efforts. I am particularly impressed by Chapters 3, 6 and 9 which are on subject matter not usually featured in many of the recent books on related topics.

Each chapter opens with a quote from famous scientists such as the Nobel Laureate Physicist, Richard Feynman (1918–1988):

Although these quotes increase the readability, for some reason, personally I am not able to relate the quote fully to the contents of the respective chapters. In addition, each chapter ends with a conclusion, for example, in Chapter 1 the authors quoted Didier Astruc (Groupe Nanosciences Moléculaires et Catalyse Université Bordeaux, France):

Although palladium is the ‘king’ of arylations (6), the authors did include other metals such as ruthenium, rhodium, iridium and even base metals such as copper, iron and nickel. This will be useful for chemists from academia and industry to look ‘out of the box’. The authors also tried to incorporate some model experimental reactions from the literature at the end of each chapter, which will be very useful for those who practice organic and organometallic chemistry.

If I have to be critical the chapters are not comprehensive. Some systematic approach also seems to be missing. The reason for that is that each chapter can be developed into a book; therefore I am amazed to see the quantum (amount) of work by these two authors to produce this book.

Conclusion

Overall this book complements other books such as the above mentioned book by Ackermann (1) and other works by Colacot (7), and by Javier Magano and Joshua Dunetz (Pfizer Inc, USA) (8). I recommend chemists buy this for their libraries.