Department of Chemistry

Organic Chemistry Textbook

by Robert Neuman

I began writing an organic chemistry textbook in 1992.  The journey has been long and filled with unexpected twists and turns.  I had hoped that I might some day see the book on shelves of campus bookstores, but I realized several years ago that this was unlikely. 

As a result, I decided to post it on the internet.  I wanted it to be available to students and faculty for studying and teaching organic chemistry.  I have now posted 21 of the 23 chapters.  I am currently working on Chapter 19 and plan to begin Chapter 6.  The figures have been merged with the text in each posted chapter.  With the exception of those in Chapter 20, they are presently all hand-drawn.

You can access the book directly through the links on this page.  They also lead to biographical information about me.  The thumbnail version of my biography is "I retired from a 35 year position in the chemistry department at UC Riverside in 1998 and moved to Santa Barbara where I taught part-time at UCSB from 2000 to 2008".

My greatest fan and supporter, through all of my efforts to be an author, has been, and continues to be, my wife Pat!  Without her encouragement I would have abandoned all of this a long time ago!
 

Bob Neuman 
July 2013

Introduction

The Book Now: I have posted 21 of the 23 chapters shown in the Chapter Outline.  These 21 chapters are formatted in pdf and include hand-drawn figures merged with the text.  Each chapter begins with a Detailed Table of Contents with page numbers.  I have compiled all of these Detailed Tables of Contents in a single pdf document - Detailed Tables of Contents.

The Book History: If you found your way to this page using the links on the introductory web page, you already know some of the history of my writing endeavor.  I give more details in the following link - History of the Book.

The Acknowledgements: I owe a lot of people great thanks for their encouragement with this writing and more importantly for their positive contributions to both my personal and academic lives.  I have listed some of them here - Acknowledgements. I want to particularly remember Neil Campbell, a botanist and incredibly successful author of biology textbooks, who was my mentor and friend at UCR.  Tragically, he suffered a sudden fatal coronary event on October 21, 2004 at the age of 58. 

The Author: I was born in Chicago, moved with my parents to Los Angeles at the age of 3, attended Dacotah St. Elementary School, and Gage Junior High School, moved to Whittier, CA, when I was 13, and graduated from Whittier High School in 1955.  I did my undergraduate studies at UCLA, earned my Ph.D. at Caltech, was a post-doc at Columbia, and then joined the chemistry faculty at the University of California, Riverside.  You can see my professional biography here - Robert Neuman.
 

Copyright 1992-2013 by Robert C. Neuman, Jr.