The Emperor Of Scent

Patrick Suskind's novel Perfume made real - the true history of a scientific genius with eerie powers of smell who uses his gifts to solve one of the body's last secrets: how the nose works.

The Emperor of Scent is a gem of a book- I was mesmerised and enlightened by the many perfect asides woven into the main body of this incredible true tale.

With the contagious enthusiasm of a nerd given the run of a chemistry lab, he has transformed a chance meeting with a curious biophysicist named Luca Turin into an amusing and poetic adventure in science and art.

Ebullient- a book that celebrates the randomness and arbitrariness of discovery while also translating complex science into the colloquial- as its title indicates, The Emperor of Scent presents a larger-than-life autocrat and his interesting, engaging eccentricities-an inspired, exhilarating view of idiosyncratic science

Fascinating and lucid- the details of Turin's work unfold like a revelation. For his part, Burr does a fine job of turning both the science and the academic jockeying around a possible publication in Nature into a pulse-racing affair.

A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, back-stabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. The Emperor of Scent is a quirky, wonderful book.

Chandler Burr is the author of A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation. He has contributed to the Atlantic, was a Contributing Editor at US News &amp; World Report, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He lives in New York.

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 secret of the most enigmatic of our senses.

Chandler Burr

In August 1991 newspaper headlines around the world announced an amazing discovery: a difference in the brains of heterosexuals and homosexuals. In 1993 American scientists claimed they had discovered a gay gene. Sexual orientation, it now seems, is not a choice, not a disease nor a faddish whim, but a fundamental biological part of who we are. 
 
Chandler Burr's ground-breaking work is the first and only comprehensive look at this revolutionary new science, biology on the farthest edges of current scientific practice. A Separate Creation: How Biology Makes Us Gay takes us into laboratories where researchers are using incredible technologies to discover what makes us straight or gay. From studies of male rats that ovulate and a species of African animal in which the female has a penis, to the political fire-storm surrounding the claim of a gay gene, from a new silicon chip made of human DNA that could discern the sexual orientation of the foetus in a woman's womb, to a working theory that homosexuality is a genetic/bacterial condition that could be 'cured' with an antibiotic, Burr explores this fascinating and often ethically ambiguous territory with clarity and an objective eye.

Chandler Burr

Books by Chandler Burr

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