Smell This Book

Scent is one of our most primitive and oldest senses and the one tied most closely to memory. Ever smell something and immediately get taken back in time to your childhood? If you have a yen for the olfactory, then take a whiff of Chandler Burr's The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession, and the Last Mystery of the Senses.

The Emperor of Scent tells of the scientific maverick Luca Turin, a connoisseur and something of an aesthete who wrote a bestselling perfume guide and bandied about an outrageous new theory on the human sense of smell. Drawing on cutting-edge work in biology, chemistry, and physics, Turin used his obsession with perfume and his eerie gift for smell to turn the cloistered worlds of the smell business and science upside down, leading to a solution to the last great mystery of the senses: how the nose works.