About 10 years ago, the "honors" gen chem course at Cornell taught by Stephen Lee was attempting to do this. He might have written the course notes into a book

About 10 years ago, the "honors" gen chem course at Cornell taught by Stephen Lee was attempting to do this. He might have written the course notes into a book by now but his health isn't great. The course syllabus was presented as an onion bulb with the outer layers labeled as parts of MO theory (wavefunctions etc) and the core was the "beautiful flower" of the chemical bond, which grows out of the surrounding concepts. The course began with wavefunctions discussed in the context of audio and vibrating plates (e.g. violin bow on a square plate with salt shows its resonance modes) and built it up into first principles derivation of macroscopic observable properties of a substance. Anyway, the coursework was absolutely brutal for most freshmen, and the premeds hated it, but about 5 percent of students every year got absolutely enamored by the beauty of solid state physics.