cover image What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life

What the Nose Knows: The Science of Scent in Everyday Life

Avery Gilbert, . . Crown, $23.95 (290pp) ISBN 978-1-4000-8234-6

Psychologist and smell scientist Gilbert's serious science is enlivened by a whimsical sense of humor. He is entertaining when affirming common wisdoms regarding smell—mothers can discern the smell of their child's diapers from another's (and think the smell sweeter), and, yes, women's sense of smell is better than men's. Gilbert destroys some shibboleths—blind people smell no better than sighted people, and dogs' and humans' senses of smell are probably reasonably similar. Gilbert is also interested in how smell is treated in the arts, riffing on Proust's ruminations on smell and memory, or “déja-smell,” as Gilbert calls it. He energetically describes the epic 1950s Hollywood battle between “Smell-O-Vision” and “AromaRama”; the physiology of the popular tabloid tales of dead, decaying bodies found after a neighbor's report of “a foul odor” from a nearby apartment; and the possible evolutionary future of the human ability to smell. Gilbert is also surprisingly romantic, and elegiac, in describing smells that modern society has lost, odors he includes in his novel concept of “smellscape.” Gilbert is an entertaining guide and worth sniffing around with. (July)