Catalysis of Organic Reactions

Ed M L Prunier, CRC Press, 2009, 549pp

Price £108, ISBN 978-1-4200-7076-7.

The proceedings of the 22nd conference on ‘Catalysis of Organic Reactions’ maintains the high standard of previous volumes.  The focus is more towards heterogeneous catalysis but increasingly, homogeneous catalysis is creeping in.  There are lots of case studies from industry, and topics include C-C coupling, amination and oxidation as well as hydrogenation and hydrogenolysis.

One interesting and surprising chapter is from DuPont, who have been studying the reduction of thiocyanates to thiols using a carbon-supported Pd-Sn catalyst.  The catalyst is quite robust and does not suffer the usual poisoning of palladium by sulphur compounds (and cyanide byproduct too).