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

~ Avery Gilbert (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Gilbert, a psychologist concerned with the aromatic side of life, is a marvelous storyteller. Weaving together all that is involved in human anatomical smell function, the connecting wires between smell and emotional life, comparative data revealing differences and likenesses between men and women and dogs and humans, the invention and production of artificial scents, and more, he leads readers from tales that amaze to facts that amuse, interspersing opportunities for unabashed wonder. Would the entertainment world be different today if Smell-O-Vision hadn't been beat to market by AromaRama? Would your sense of smell be better if you hadn't played soccer as a kid? Are there good vocational choices for folks who can't smell well at all? The author's prose is flawless, making this book a perfect choice for teens interested in science as well as those still nursing a middle school devotion to trivia. Be sure to point it out to Advanced Placement teachers in both the English and physical sciences departments, but expect less-motivated readers to find chunks of it welcome when read aloud.—Francisca Goldsmith, Halifax Public Libraries, Nova Scotia
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Review

Finalist for the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology


“[S]mart, eminently readable. . . . a lighthearted book, packed with curious tidbits.”
–New York Observer

“[A]n entertaining romp through the science of smell.”
–Newsweek

“Avery Gilbert is the David Sedaris of the nostril, the Mark Twain of the nasal passages.”
–JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association)

“Avery Gilbert's whistle-stop journey . . . through, around and inside the nose is remarkably entertaining, and a great read for anyone seeking a tour that awakens the senses. Everybody who is anybody in the world of scent, and a few impostors too, make an appearance as we bounce from chapter to chapter, learning diverse olfactory gems.”
–New Scientist

“[A] great deal of fun. . . . What the Nose Knows provides a well-researched, even scholarly, compendium of olfactory facts and fallacies, woven into an enticing history of the uses and misuses of scent. Having dug through what one can imagine must have been some very moldy smelling archives, Gilbert presents a wide-ranging yet deep look at what our ‘noses knowses.’”
–Science

“[A] great book on an overlooked topic. . . . Gilbert combines a scientist’s sense of wonder, a scent-making professional’s sensibility, and a slightly Beavis and Butt-Head-like fascination with aroma.”
–Peter Dykstra, CNN Science, SciTechBlog

“The volume is almost a guilty pleasure (since smell jokes are generally vulgar), hence one of the best kinds of book. Besides its entertainment value, it is also genuinely informative. . . . Gilbert quips like a stand-up comic throughout but never lets humor trump solid, research-based information, which is nothing to sniff at.”--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Crown (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140008234X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400082346
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,686 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A pundit writes about smell: insightful, irreverent and scholarly, August 2, 2008

By	Danielle R. Reed (Glenside, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Many widely-held beliefs about smell are so plausible and so often-repeated that they have become accepted as fact although the evidence for them is often equivocal. In this book, the author traces the origins of these urban myths to uncover what is (and what is not) known about our sense of smell, pointing out soggy logic and supporting his arguments with an eclectic bibliography. These stories are relayed in a cheeky style from the perspective of someone who has seen and smelled it all. Credible pundits are rare and this book is excellent example of science writing for the general reader.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fabulous Summer Read, July 9, 2008

By	T from NYC (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

I'm a big fan of well-written, witty, evenly paced and interesting non-fiction books. Though I have no scientific background whatsoever, I'm partial to the science kind, and if the author can nimbly jump to making defensible philosophical or cultural points, so much the better. (Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma were excellent examples of the genre; David Quammen's Monster of God a pretty good, but somewhat flawed example; if you like this kind of stuff, you get the idea.) What The Nose Knows fits the bill perfectly for me. First, it's extremely well written: Gilbert has a distinctive voice, a knack for turning a phrase, and a strong and irreverent sense of humor. Second, it's interesting: like most folks, I never give the sense of smell its due, but Gilbert does. You want to know about Hollywood's effort to market movies that smell, or the science behind creating certain smells, or even how we smell? Here you go. Finally, it's evenly paced: there's a lot of information being exchanged, but it's not boring or didactic. Gilbert's like that interesting guy at the cocktail party who knows a lot about something you don't, but has a knack for making it understandable to you without dumbing it down. I give this book five stars, and strongly recommend it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Strong literary flavor, masking complex scientific overtones, November 30, 2008

By	D. P. Birkett (Suffern, NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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I enjoyed this well-written book, and learned a lot from it. It is often brilliantly funny. Avery Gilbert covers the history of the subject in great detail. Some of the minutiae about the history of smell in the movies had me skipping pages but might be very useful for someone in marketing or advertising. The clinical account of anosmia is better than in most neurology texts. He is a very perceptive literary critic, with the ability to convey the impression of having read through whole books by Faulkner and of reading Proust in French.
Some aspects of the hard science are skimped. He does not exactly explain what Buck and Axel got the Nobel Prize for. There is almost nothing about neuroanatomy and there are no tables or illustrations, although there are ample references. Someone with a serious interest in the field might want also to read Chapter 34 by Dodd and Carellucci, in Kandel's ""Principles of Neuroscience."
The fundamental difference between the way the brain deals with smell and other sensations is only touched on in a quotation (a very apposite quotation) from Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858. Pheromones are not in the index.
The central puzzle is why we human beings have lost so much of our sense of smell. Gilbert's main answer is to insist that we haven't lost as much as we think. That is one aspect of the problem. It's especially important as a problem because of the strange way humans, especially males, select preferred sex objects. Humans have all the brain structures in place to be sexually motivated by smell, as are the other apes, but this ability got hi-jacked by vision somewhere along the evolutionary way.