The ultimate guide to the smells of the universe - the ambrosial to
the malodorous, and everything in between - from the author of the
acclaimed culinary guides On Food and Cooking and Keys to Good
Cooking
From Harold McGee, James Beard Award-winning author and leading expert
on the science of food and cooking, comes an extensive exploration of
the long-overlooked world of smell. In Nose Dive, McGee takes us on a
sensory adventure, from the sulfurous nascent earth more than four
billion years ago, to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of
the Himalayas, to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of
phenol and formaldehyde escape between the keys. We'll sniff the
ordinary (wet pavement and cut grass) and the extraordinary (ambergris
and truffles), the delightful (roses and vanilla) and the challenging
(swamplands and durians). We'll smell one another. We'll smell
ourselves.
Through it all, McGee familiarizes us with the actual bits of matter
that we breathe in--the molecules that trigger our perceptions, that
prompt the citrusy smells of coriander and beer and the medicinal smells
of daffodils and sea urchins. And like everything in the physical world,
molecules have histories. Many of the molecules that we smell every day
existed long before any creature was around to smell them--before there
was even a planet for those creatures to live on. Beginning with the
origins of those molecules in interstellar space, McGee moves onward
through the smells of our planet, the air and the oceans, the forest and
the meadows and the city, all the way to the smells of incense, perfume,
wine, and food.
Here is a story of the world, of every smell under our collective nose.
A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distills
the science behind the smells and translates it, as only McGee can, into
an accessible and entertaining guide. Incorporating the latest insights
of biology and chemistry, and interweaving them with personal
observations, he reveals how our sense of smell has the power to expose
invisible, intangible details of our material world and trigger in us
feelings that are the very essence of being alive.
