Research Catalog

Title

The emperor of scent : a story of obsession, perfume, and the last mystery of the senses / Chandler Burr.

Author

Burr, Chandler, 1963-

Publication

New York, NY : Random House, 2002.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xii, 318 pages : illustrations, charts; 25 cm

Summary

• "Luca Turin can distinguish the components of just about any smell, from the world's most refined perfumes to the air in a subway car on the Paris metro. A distinguished scientist, he once worked in an unrelated field, though he made a hobby of collecting fragrances. But when, as a lark, he published a collection of his reviews of the world's perfumes, the book hit the small, insular business of perfume makers like a thunderclap. Who is this man Luca Turin, they demanded, and how does he know so much?
• The closed community of scent creation opened up to Luca Turin, and he discovered a fact that astonished him: no one in this world knew how smell worked. Billions and billions of dollars were spent creating scents in a manner amounting to glorified trial and error.".
• "The solution to the mystery of every other human sense has led to the Nobel Prize, if not vast riches. Why, Luca Turin thought, should smell be any different? So he gave his life to this great puzzle. And in the end, incredibly, it would seem that he solved it. But when enormously powerful interests are threatened and great reputations are at stake, Luca Turin learned, nothing is quite what it seems."--BOOK JACKET.

Subjects

• Nose
• Biophysicists > Great Britain > Biography
• Turin, Luca
• Smell

Note

• Includes index.

ISBN

0375507973

LCCN

2002023697

OCLC

• 49260256
• ocm49260256
• SCSB-4343677

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries