The first book review here, appropriately, is J.J. Sakurai’s classic textbook, Modern Quantum Mechanics. Written in the late 1980s, prior to the author’s untimely death, the book was finished by the editor San Fu Tuan, along with others, and every physicist is lucky that they did this. Sakurai’s quantum mechanics textbook, unlike his field theory textbook Advanced Quantum Mechanics, has become a standard for any graduate level quantum mechanics course, and for good reason.

Chapters 1 through 3 of this book are by themselves worth the price tag, as they are a model for clarity in exposition on the subjects of linear algebra, time evolution, and the angular momentum algebra. From the beginning, Sakurai motivates his arguments physically, and while he uses the more abstract notions of Lie algebras and group theory to develop quantum mechanics, he does so in an accessible way, never sacrificing clarity for unnecessary rigor.

Sadly, Sakurai passed away with the final four chapters as merely notes to be collected into the remainder of the book, and it shows. The remainder of the textbook is extremely solid, covering the subjects of discrete symmetries, perturbation theory, identical particles and scattering better than almost any other textbook I have seen. However, at times being physically motivated gives way to a mathematical exercise to obtain the answer. This is a perfectly acceptable way of handling the subjects mentioned, but it lacks a certain physical picture that only Sakurai seemed to be able to put into his textbook.

These problems aside, this is still an excellent textbook, and well worth being owned by any physicist. The exercises at the end of each chapter range from trivial calculation to some true head-scratchers that really push the reader.

Pros:

• The writing style of the book is informal, and the book is highly readable.
• Results are obtained through lucid physical arguments.
• Homework problems are challenging and insightful.
• Later editions contain excellent discussions of Berry Phase.

Cons:

• The discussion of path integration covers the bare essentials to begin studying them, but gives few further details.
• Lacks a discussion of relativistic quantum mechanics.
• Probably inaccessible to most people who are new to quantum mechanics. Definitely not an “introduction” to quantum mechanics.