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A True Story of Perfume and Obsession
Random House
February 2004
On Sale: February 10, 2004
Featuring: Luca Turin
352 pages
ISBN: 0375759816
EAN: 9780375759819
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Biography
For as long as anyone can remember, a man named Luca Turin
has had an uncanny relationship with smells. He has been
compared to the hero of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, but
his story is in fact stranger, because it is true. It
concerns how he made use of his powerful gifts to solve one
of the last great mysteries of the human body: how our noses
work. Luca Turin can distinguish the components of just about any
smell, from the world's most refined perfumes to the air in
a subway car on the Paris metro. A distinguished scientist,
he once worked in an unrelated field, though he made a hobby
of collecting fragrances. But when, as a lark, he published
a collection of his reviews of the world's perfumes, the
book hit the small, insular business of perfume makers like
a thunderclap. Who is this man Luca Turin, they demanded,
and how does he know so much? The closed community of scent
creation opened up to Luca Turin, and he discovered a fact
that astonished him: no one in this world knew how smell
worked. Billions and billions of dollars were spent creating
scents in a manner amounting to glorified trial and error. The solution to the mystery of every other human sense has
led to the Nobel Prize, if not vast riches. Why, Luca Turin
thought, should smell be any different? So he gave his life
to this great puzzle. And in the end, incredibly, it would
seem that he solved it. But when enormously powerful
interests are threatened and great reputations are at stake,
Luca Turin learned, nothing is quite what it seems. Acclaimed writer Chandler Burr has spent four years
chronicling Luca Turin's quest to unravel the mystery of how
our sense of smell works. What has emerged is an
enthralling, magical book that changes the way we think
about that area between our mouth and our eyes, and its
profound, secret hold on our lives.
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