The Emperor Of Scent

Book cover of The Emperor Of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession and the Last Mystery of the Senses

Book description

In the tradition of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and James Gleick's Genius, The Emperor of Scent tells the story of Luca Turin, an utterly unusual, stubborn scientist, his otherworldly gift for perfume, his brilliant, quixotic theory of how we smell, and his struggle to set before the world the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Emperor Of Scent as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Theresa Levitt

Author

At the center of this rollicking account is the larger-than-life figure of Luca Turin, a perfume aficionado and renegade biophysicist with an uncannily sensitive nose.

Burr followed him as he traded blows with the scientific establishment over his unorthodox theory of how smell works. What emerges is a profound appreciation of just how little understood this sense still is, and how varied and potent the smells of the world are to someone as attentive to them as Turin.

From Theresa's list on perfume and scent.