A Natural History of the Senses
By Diane Ackerman
The nose knows. I smell everything and have often used my
sense of smell to diagnosis illness (sick people smell like
paint) and to predict the temperature of my steak (medium-rare
smells perfectly meaty). As someone with an oversensitive
olfactory epithelium, I read with great interest Diane Ackerman's
A Natural History of the Senses. A series of short essays
on each of the five senses, the book is full of tantalizing
tidbits: e.g., one Roman was so enamored of scent that he
suffocated in a shower of rose petals, and Bach’s music
quells anger in cultures and peoples around the world. These
kernels make the book something that you will read and enjoy
time and time again. That said, the book tends to gets smarmy
when Ackerman weaves in her own personal experience as a
way of suggesting that her op-ed observations are some how
on par with the myriad of historical, anthropological, biological,
psychological, and physiological resources from which she
draws. Fortunately, the book’s essay format makes it
very easy to move on when a particular passage becomes too
purple. Through her work, A Natural History of the Senses,
Diane Ackerman proves that she is an extremely gifted writer.
She also proves that she knows it. Nancy Williams Faris
©Copyright 2008 Libretto,
Inc. |
