The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell by Jonas Olofsson
Being a body in the world is an endlessly stimulating affair. How bizarre that we should ever succumb to disenchantment – boredom, even! – when our five senses extend perpetual invitation into a rich-to-the-point-of-limitless extravagance of possible experiences. Often I lament that we are nowhere near as excited about this as the situation warrants. Why, in such a sensual world as ours is, are we not in constant raptures? (I recognize that practical hurdles exist to bar the way to ecstasy. Full-force exaltation is frowned upon in most workplaces, for example.) Thankfully, we have books like Jonas Olofsson’s The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell to counter at least some of our senseless ennui. Olofsson, a Swedish psychologist and olfaction expert, contends that our sense of smell is not only poorly understood but also grossly underestimated. Recent research suggests that human noses are more adept than previously assumed—not quite dog-grade sniffers, but not far behind. We have been self-effacing about our sense of smell because, historically, people have failed to see a sensitive nose as something to be proud of. Instead, olfaction was considered a “base” and “primitive” faculty, the domain of beasts and, according to Aristotle, women. Yet smell evokes memory like no other sense, it gives the better part of taste to our feasting, and what a terrible desert is anosmia, when our noses malfunction and banish us to an olfactory void. The Forgotten Sense makes an enthusiastic and spirited, science-backed case for rediscovering the neglected wonders of scent.
For fans of Ed Yong’s An Immense World and Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses.
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World by Dorian Lynskey
If you feel like the world is ending, you’re not alone—and you never would have been. Fantasizing and fretting over doomsday is a time-honored human pastime, as well as a preeminent theme of literary and artistic output. Journalist Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is an encyclopedic rundown of all this apocalyptic foreboding, its 500 odd pages brimming over with disarmingly inventive visions of collapse, chaos, and terminal destruction. Given the subject matter, one might expect the book to cast something of a blackish pall, but Lynskey’s razory wit combines with the staggering sweep of his references to deliver perhaps the best time you’re likely to have contemplating imminent annihilation. If it is any solace, what the book demonstrates above all is that humanity has been convinced that the end was near since the beginning. Somehow, though, we are still here, alive and kicking, not yet zombies dragging the cold and fetid hulls of our former selves across the greying barrens of a nuclear winter. Despite the stampeding onslaught of existential threats that western civilization has spent its tumultuous reign combating and contriving in equal measure, we’ve still got a world. Let’s try and keep it that way, shall we?
For fans of alien invasions, the zombie apocalypse, AI overlords, eco-horror, Dr. Strangelove, J.G. Ballard, locust swarms, and every shade of pestilence.
