[(The Emperor of Scent: A Story of Perfume, Obsession and the Last Mystery of the Senses )] [Author: Chandler Burr] [Apr-2004] Paperback – 3 April 2004

This is the second time I've bought this book.

Chandler Burr writes beautifully about perfume. If only he would stick to it... When he strays off the subject onto anything else, he is excruciatingly bad and pretentious. This book charts the attempts of Luca Turin to have his theory of how smell works accepted by the scientific establishment. Burr is a complete convert: I, not being a chemist, am not so sure. But a very interesting read about perfume and smell and chemistry - good for popular science fans, but no match for Turin's own book.

Well written, and interesting, but the problem is that the theory of smell proposed by the subject of the book does not stand up well enough.

Anyone approaching this book has a problem; the subject of the book, Luca Turin, is fascinating, his brilliance undoubted, but his skills are difficult to describe to the lay reader. Chandler Burr has some descriptive skills, and manages to explain simply some quite difficult science. The trouble is that he has wrapped it up in a trendy, gossipy, women's magazine style of writing, and an additional, substantial problem is that he has both a tin ear for dialogue, most of which one imagines he is creating, and a liking for prose so purple that it becomes meaningless.A sample, describing a group eating at a restaurant: "The food arrives en masse." (Food cannot arrive en masse; the phrase describes a group of individuals acting collectively) "trays and steaming platters of it," (ah, the singular 'it' referring to 'food', so the plural implicit in 'en masses' is now discarded) "and much shifting about and many bowls and spoons and plates being set down all at once like hail falling on the table" (Being set down, but then compared with hail falling! eh?) "They" (people not cutlery or plates) "pick up utensils and absorb the food as if by osmosis."Osmosis, as teenagers in biology lessons learn, is the slow passage of water through a semi permeable membrane from a weaker solution to a stronger. Does Chandler think that osmosis sounds like a word implying speed? Wouldn't it be worth looking it up, and getting it right?His tendency to prefer a breathless flow of words, of the style encountered in teen fanzines, is a bore throughout, and occasionally he opts for the bizarre: Turin is described sending an email to the editor of a scientific journal, Nick Short. The email is quoted, then three stars like pale grey bullet points across the middle of the page provide a breathing space, a device used throughout the book, then the chapter ends thus: "SHORT said no." Why the caps? What does it mean? Is it another small reason why the book as a whole is such a tiring, and tiresome, read?Turin's story is a fascinating one, and ongoing. Unfortunately he is very poorly served by "The Emperor of Scent" (whatever that title means, and, incidentally, I have no idea why Amazon has it listed as The Emperor of Scent Enses, unless it is a surreptitious dig at Burr's fussy writing style.)

Although the book gets quite technical the authors fun, engaging style make it absolutely readable. I learned a lot about scent and some intricacies of how scientific research works and doesn’t work.

tout OK

Interesante información sobre la trayectoria profesional de Luca Turín

Excellent book if you are curious about the simply complexe theory of how we smell and the brilliance of the theorist behind it!

Fantastic book. Harbinger of a new era of understanding of scent. We are only just beginning to understand smell. Someday we will do amazing things with scent, beyond our current wildest dreams.