The mission of 21st Century Chemistry is scientific literacy. This book prepares students for everyday life: From understanding nutrition labels, to monitoring global climate change and, perhaps most importantly, to making good decisions in the voting booth. Waldron accomplishes this mission by engaging students in the science. She brilliantly blends the central ideas of chemistry into stories that are relevant and familiar to her readers' own experiences. Michelle Nijhuis may have put it best in a recent New York Times opinion piece. She said: "In its crudest form, science writing simply translates the latest results from the academy: Coffee is good for you, bean sprouts are not, and your sex life is much, much worse than you thought. Better science stories put new results in context, synthesizing and analyzing what came before, what might come next, and why you should care." Waldron does just this - by weaving the chemistry in the context of riveting stories, she masterfully captures the attention of her readers.