Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells

by Harold McGee

The ultimate guide to the smells of the universe – the ambrosial to the malodorous, and everything in between – from the author of the acclaimed culinary guides On Food and Cooking and Keys to Good Cooking

From Harold McGee, James Beard Award-winning author and leading expert on the science of food and cooking, comes an extensive exploration of the long-overlooked world of smell. In Nose Dive , McGee takes us on a sensory adventure, from the sulfurous nascent earth more than four billion years ago, to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of phenol and formaldehyde escape between the keys. We'll sniff the ordinary (wet pavement and cut grass) and the extraordinary (ambergris and truffles), the delightful (roses and vanilla) and the challenging (swamplands and durians). We'll smell one another. We'll smell ourselves.

Through it all, McGee familiarizes us with the actual bits of matter that we breathe in—the molecules that trigger our perceptions, that prompt the citrusy smells of coriander and beer and the medicinal smells of daffodils and sea urchins. And like everything in the physical world, molecules have histories. Many of the molecules that we smell every day existed long before any creature was around to smell them—before there was even a planet for those creatures to live on. Beginning with the origins of those molecules in interstellar space, McGee moves onward through the smells of our planet, the air and the oceans, the forest and the meadows and the city, all the way to the smells of incense, perfume, wine, and food.

Here is a story of the world, of every smell under our collective nose. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distills the science behind the smells and translates it, as only McGee can, into an accessible and entertaining guide. Incorporating the latest insights of biology and chemistry, and interweaving them with personal observations, he reveals how our sense of smell has the power to expose invisible, intangible details of our material world and trigger in us feelings that are the very essence of being alive.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Food, Cooking, Cookbooks, Reference, Chemistry

688 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2020

About the author

Harold James McGee is an American author who writes about the chemistry and history of food science and cooking. He is best known for his seminal book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen initially published in 1984 and revised in 2004.

McGee is a visiting scholar at Harvard University. His book On Food and Cooking has won numerous awards and is used widely in food science courses at many universities. McGee's scientific approach to cooking has been embraced and popularized by chefs and authors such as Heston Blumenthal, David Chang, Alton Brown, Shirley Corriher, Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Russ Parsons.

Reviews

[ALX · Rating 5 out of 5]

It frustrated me that I couldn’t describe a smell beyond simple words that didn’t give a fuller meaning to the scent. Before reading this book, “sweet” or “stale“ was about as descriptive as I could get. The aim of Nose Dive is to help you “acquire a new nose” or develop the relevant part of the brain to notice the odors around you so you can have a fuller experience of the world. That’s a dramatic claim, but while reading I felt I was already starting to train my nose (and mind) to discriminate between odors and understand what makes something smell the way it does. This book is truly a dive into the science and experience of scents. You can dive deep into the chemistry of volatiles or stay shallow and browse the many “smell tables” where items (food, flowers, parts of the body, and many more) are listed with their component smells and the molecules responsible. The author set out to discover why some food smells “suggest or echo or rhyme with very different things”. The answers are fascinating and varied but the book isn’t only concerned with food. More than half is devoted to smells found in nature that may rarely be experienced first-hand, but contribute to how we perceive and describe other more common scents. I learned so much about how, why and which molecules produce smell and how to begin picking apart the layers of scent in everyday life. I learned why old books smell good! I thought it was because I love books and libraries but no, it’s the molecule guaiacol (smells smoky), vanillin (vanilla) and benzaldehyde (almond essence), all from the wood pulp lignin.

[Melba · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would be a 3.5 if there was a means to show that in the rating. It is a book that will legitimately be rated much higher and, just as easily, much lower depending on the background and interests and stamina of the reader. The author, Harold McGee, is surely a genius and his eagerness to share his in-depth knowledge of the world of smells in as friendly a way as possible is to be admired. He even provides charts every step of the way to help summarize the findings. The problem is that he can't help himself from taking it to a level of scientific detail that will leave many readers (myself included) more than a little overwhelmed. In short, I found the content of this book equally fascinating and grueling. I fought my way through to the finish and am glad I did.....but, whoa, I don't want to do it again!

Here is what I most appreciated in the book. It is very well organized and so very comprehensive across both time and the different sources of smells. My favorite and one of the more understandable parts (chapters 1, 2 and 3) was titled, Simplest Smells, in which the author returns to fourteen billions years ago to describe "the birth of the cosmos as a whole and the origins and evolution of life on Earth", and how, "from a handful of elementary particles the Chef has made countless kinds of molecules, with countless qualities." He explains how Carbon "is the backbone of life on Earth" and how carbon chains tend to be "volatile" meaning they are "prone to go airborne and become smellable." That was an interesting concept to me, that smells are basically floating molecules and that we humans can only smell those for which we possess smell receptors. There are so many smells out there that are beyond our capacity to sense them. The writing in the book ranges from poetic to alarmingly "textbookish". I loved the poetry. When describing the smells of soil, rock, and stone, he notes that, "They come from patches of Earth itself, the clump of cosmic rubble whose star-warmed surface is our home". The author is clearly a lover of words and takes the time to frequently share the latin origins of them, adding a new dimension to their meaning. For example, the word "soil" comes from an ancient root meaning "sit". The soil is "the plant kingdom's low profile throne, the seat of power from which potentate tress and humble weeds alike bestow food and shelter on the land's other creatures."

And then there were the reasons why it was difficult for me to muddle through this book. It included information, ideas, and certainly terminology that was simply beyond me and it would not have mattered how many times I reread the sentence or the paragraph e.g. "When animals are fed pasturage relatively rich in protein and lignin and other phenolic rings, the same process deposits barnyardy cresols and skatole, which combine with the methyloctanoic acid in an animilic 'pastoral' flavor." Not gonna happen. This challenging element seemed to increase the further I got into the book and it was only through a stubborn persistence that I managed to read to the finish.

But, in the end, I am very glad I did and am certainly more informed and intrigued by the concept of smell than I was before. The best thing I did was to highlight the text that held the most meaning and interest to me as I proceeded through the book. Someday, I will go back and reread those highlighted words. Although not soon.

[P K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about Harold McGee (author of On Food and Cooking) going on a ten year journey through the world of smells. It was instigated by the first time he had aged grouse and found the smells at first virulently repellent, but later pleasant, and extremely interesting. The result is a journey through perhaps our most under-talked-about sense. I read the book as part of a neuroscience book club I co-run, and thus I read it cover to cover (not the index at the end). This was fine, but this cinder block sized book is perhaps better utilized as a reference book. It definitely has narrative elements, but I got a bit burned out on the chemistry reading the whole thing in a month.
I really enjoyed McGee's imaginative approach. He begins by discussing the smells in interstellar space and says most would smell unpleasant and chemical-y to us. But once you start adding oxygen, you get the molecules we associate with life. I like the way he groups the smells, and draws parallels between how smells evolved in really dissimilar organisms but under related circumstances. For example, terpenoids. Volatile terpenoids may have been initially developed for signaling by early land insects, then adopted as insect-confusing defenses by early land plants. It’s shared terpenoids that make ginger and lemongrass resemble Amazonian ants. This pattern of land insects using a molecule for signaling, only for it to be synthesized by plants to confuse and manipulate them is a common pattern we see over and over again in the book. I found that fascinating.
Similarly fascinating, but much more speculative, is McGee's idea that for early humans, perhaps encountering whiffs of themselves in certain strange new foods made those initially odd materials more approachable to eat. For example, cheese is a solid concentrate of proteins and fats, the same major ingredients of our body, and the surface of freshly made cheese is readily colonized by some of the same protein- and fat-eating bacteria that live on our skin. In modern day, McGee says we all find the weird smells of our bodies delightful, even if we don’t admit it. So foods that have some of those same smells allow us to have those delight experiences, but at a remove, and at times of our choosing, thus skirting the social embarrassment. If nothing else, it was comforting to learn that McGee also weirdly enjoys the smell of his own armpits when he's alone.
I also found the attentional capture idea he presented quite interesting. Sometimes an unpleasant element in a complex odor mixture promotes “attentional capture”—gets the brain to commit more resources to processing the sensation—and this strengthens and prolongs the overall sensation. Indole is an example, it usually signals animals and decay, both potential threats, but is found in smells we typically find pleasant. In an experiment in which a mixture widely regarded was pleasant had a little indole added to it, participants found that mixture more pleasant than it was without the indole.
Overall, really interesting exploration of a topic I wish more people wrote and thought about. It had me smelling my environment with more gusto, and with a more open mind than usual. It made me notice a lot of "out of place" smells as elements of familiar smells. It made me draw parallels across much broader categories than usual, and thus I felt I was smelling a bit more objectively, without as much expectation. It also made me really want to try a traditionally prepared grouse.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Being a fan of McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen I had to read this book. It didn't disappoint. It was a difficult read in that there is so much technical information in the form of chemical names and structures that my reading proceeded slowly. McGee makes it clear in the beginning of the book that there are many approaches to the book. I chose to mostly ignore the chemical names. Some of them, though repetition, become familiar but "ignoring" them didn't affect my enjoyment of the book. McGee's writing is very engaging and inspired me to become more of an intentional sniffer and to get into the habit of "listening to smells."

One surprise for me was how evocative it was. As I read his discussion of various scents I found myself remembering and "smelling" odors/fragrances from my past at various ages and in many different settings. I guess that is not surprising in that olfactory neurons are closely associated with memory.

[Traci Rhoades · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a weekend beach read, but super interesting. A slow dive, if you will. I'd never considered listening to what my nose was telling me, but it truly has a lot to say.

[Dallin Kohler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Would have been amazing if it was scratch and sniff. It was comprehensive and thorough to the point of feeling too textbook-y for me. 2.5 stars.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating read. Provides you with science and language to describe smells. T by, stinky, sweaty feet, great descriptors.

I must admit, I tended to skim the science stuff.

[Maggie]

This book is fascinating, and both highly readable and completely unreadable. I finally abandoned it. Because, while it's dense and magical and weird and erudite and broad, it's also kind of tedious.

But there are gems like this: "Ambergris is the strangest of all fragrance materials, a startling demonstration of Hero Carbon's protean permutability. It begins as a stinking obstruction in the rectum of ocean-cruising sperm whales, and ends years later as sublime seashore jetsam, the finest emitting a smell like no other, with facets of the ocean and soil, exotic woods, incense, and tobacco."

And here's what petrichor is: "So the smell of freshly wetted stone turns out not to come from the stone’s own minerals. Petrichor, or gaiachor, is the veneer of volatiles that had been emitted by microbes, fungi, plants, animals, humans and our technologies, then modified in the atmosphere by sunlight, oxygen, nitrogen, and one another and accumulated on mineral surfaces. These volatiles are usually too sparse and omnipresent for us to notice them in the air around us. But when rain suddenly drives them in greater amounts from mineral surfaces into the air, the volatiles become perceptible."

[Clare Fauke · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish there was a category for "too long didn't read" cause this would be at the top. I get it -- dude knows a lot of astrophysics and earthbound physics and chemistry, but lord, please get to the point.

[Peter]

Heel interessant. Veel te veel info om te onthouden. Erg goed geschreven, zeker als je bedenkt dat het boek vol tabellen staat en vaak informatie herhaalt zodat de lezer weet waar het over gaat.

[Fred Cheyunski · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Deep Plunge into Odors and Their Chemistry - Hearing the author interviewed on NPR when book came out, I was intrigued as it seems not many popular books have been devoted to our “grand olfactory.” At least, since I could not remember another such book, I secured a copy to read. As I proceeded, I found that the text is indeed, as its main title suggests, a deep plunge into odors and their chemistry, yet written in a compelling and interesting manner.

Sub-titled “a field guide,” the book is a tome of 688 pages divided into a preface and introduction, then 5 parts of 19 chapters and a conclusion. Namely, there is the Preface: My First Grouse, the Introduction: A Sense of the Essential, Part 1, Simplest Smells: (1) Among the Stars (2) Planet Earth, Early Life, Stinking Sulfur, (3) Starter Set; Part 2, Animals – Dependence, Mobility, Microbiomes: (4) Animal Bodies, (5) Animal Signals, (6) The Human Animal; Part 3, Land Plants – Independence Immobility, Virtuosity: (7) Sweet Smells of Success, (8) Plant Volatile Families: Green, Fruity, Flowery, Spicy, (9) Mosses, Trees, Grasses, Weeds, (10) Flowers, (11) Edible Greens and Herbs, (12) Edible Roots and Seeds: Staples and Spices, (13) Fruits; Part 4, Land, Waters, After-Life: (14) The Land: Soil, Fungi, Stone, (15) The Waters: Plankton, Seaweeds, Shellfish, Fish, (16) After-Life: Smoke, Asphalt, Industry; Part 5, Chosen Smells: (17) Fragrances, (18) Cooked Foods, (19) Cured and Fermented Foods; and Conclusion: My Second Grouse.

My favorite aspects of the book come in the Introduction as McGee gives the rationale for his 10-year exploration, an explanation of smell and an overview of the book, which then becomes quite involved. For instance, at the start (Location 71-73), the author states “This book is about smells, and about making the most of our access to them . . . a guide to the wide world of smells, nice and not, and the airborne molecular specks that stimulate them.” He goes on (in Location 157 -63) to elucidate that “Smell is such a powerful and revealing sense because it detects actual little pieces of things in the world” ---the volatile molecules given off---hence the attention to volatile chemistry. Indicating that smell is more versatile than taste, the author explains that odors are made up of composites of these “volatiles” likening them to musical chords. He continues a little later (Location 289-98) to detail that “. . . receptors register their target molecules . . . send electrical pulses .to particular receiving areas in the brain. . . the brain processes the many streams of signals and integrates them into a sensation . . . [and] coordinates all of our biological functions to help us survive in a complex, ever-changing world.” McGee proceeds historically and topically from the Big Bang, planetary and life formation as well as societal development to explicate the simplest to most complex volatile molecules and associated odors. He uses helpful charts to summarize particular items of interest such as specific flowers, associated smells, and the molecules from which they are constituted.

As he progresses, McGee brings to mind other books such as those about other senses such as Levitin’s “This is Your Brain on Music” and Hockney’s “History of Pictures.” He also had me recalling physical science narratives such as in Green’s “Until the End of Time” or Bauer’s “Western Science” as well as psychology/neurology texts like Feldman Barrett’s “How Emotions Are Made.”

While among the book’s strengths is the amount of detail, this trait is also one its drawback as well. At times, I felt it was going on and on. Then it occurred to me, the book would best be used as a reference that can be consulted as one has questions or comes into contact with different smells. While I did like the charts provided, they are difficult to read in Kindle edition, so if using as a resource, one might want a printed version.

Even with that said, “sniff out” this book and consider the aromatic dimension more fully.

[Dave Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being a fan of Harold McGee's previous book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, I had to read his latest. It didn't disappoint. It was a somewhat difficult read because there is so much technical information in the form of chemical names and structures that my reading proceeded slowly. McGee makes it clear in the beginning of the book that there are many approaches to the book. I chose to mostly ignore the chemical names. McGee's writing is very engaging and inspired me to become more of an intentional sniffer and get into the habit of "listening to smells. Some people will view this book as more of a textbook than a casual read.

The first of the five sections of the book describes primordial smells, followed by animal, plant, land, and water smells, followed by the smells of food and fragrances.

My takeaways included:

Humans have a strong sense of smell. A 2014 study estimated that the human nose "could distinguish, in theory, up to a trillion different odors. The only problem is, it's very hard to describe most scents. We can classify shapes and colors precisely and have hundreds of sound words to differentiate booms and bangs from buzzes and beeps. With smells, however, most of us are left groping. We just don't have a vocabulary for odors beyond vague descriptors like "wet dog" or "chemically."

We have 400 odor receptors that work with each other to distinguish smells.

McGee writes that we mentally categorize smells based on where we first encounter them. And it turns out that "smell is the most important sense when it comes to distinguishing among different foods. Taste and smell together make the flavor. But taste only really tells us about fundamental sensations. It's the sense of smell that gives us all the variety."

The molecules we smell today got their start as the universe' cooked.' We have receptors for specific smells, like eggy, sulfurous hydrogen sulfide, and ammonia. There are other things we don't smell, like methane.
McGee writes, "plants and animals smell different, and plants smell better, particularly after death." He describes the process of death and resulting smells this way: "When an animal dies, its unmanaged enzymes begin to break down its tissues, microbes gain entry and feed and generate metabolic wastes, fees, and beetles attracted by all these volatiles lay eggs that hatch into hungry maggots the produce their waste, and eventually solid flesh liquefies." Plus, we learn that animal excrement is very different in smell. Horse excrement is less offensive than beef and dairy cattle because of the types of food they eat.

The earliest physicians found that the way people smelled often indicated medical conditions. Foul breath may indicate a damaged liver. A honey-like smell of the urine could indicate diabetes.

Why does poop smell? "Excrement is malodorous because the colon is airlines, and the gut microbiome is anaerobic. As microbes break down, they produce a smell when they leave the body.

Benjamin Franklin proposed studying why farts smell. He knew that the smell was affected by what we eat but hoped to find the diet to elevate the problem.

The smell of our breath is caused by the bacterial breakdown of microbes of the food we eat. But even if we haven't eaten in the morning, we wake with 'bad breath' because there hasn't been enough saliva to wash away the bacteria.

Our feet have a quarter of a million sweat glands that release moisture, minerals, and glucose sugar. When the chemicals are not broken down, we develop a sweaty-foot cheesy smell.

I feel bad for not raving about this book. McGee has done his research, but I sometimes thought he wanted to write an organic chemistry book instead of something for non-scientists. His examples were fascinating, but I got lost in some of the chemistry.

[Keenan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s a deep irony in publishing a book about the what and why and how of smell in the middle of a global pandemic where everyone with two brain cells is wearing a mask outdoors. I’m all for it.

Going into this book blind made for an interesting adventure (sorry to everyone reading this review). I did not expect one of the first chapters to be the smells of the universe after the Big Bang, or for a verbose section on cat piss, or for chapter-by-chapter lessons in the intricacies of organic chemistry. Lest this seem like a simple textbook (the number of tables within is suggestive), we’re treated throughout with historical anecdotes, personal stories, and invitations to deeper cultural understanding through the volatiles that shape our world. To put it another way, it’s rare to find a book that’ll quote Paradise Lost on one page:

[The archangel Raphael] now is come
Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrh,
And flowering Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balm;
A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here
Wantoned as in her prime, and played at will
Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet,
Wild above Rule or Art; enormous bliss.
Him, through the spicy Forest onward come,
Adam discerned, as in the door he sat
Of his cool Bower.

and a diagram of the metabolic processes and associated smells of land plants on another:

Aside from answering questions one may never have considered (why do rocks smell, why does goat smell more gamey, etc.), two points are highlighted over and over much to the delight of the reader. The first (and the reason for the Big Bang chapter) is that the progression of smells can be understood in a much longer temporal frame than the average human lifetime: yeasts and insects have existed far longer than flowers, the latter likely learning to imitate smells from the former to entice or repel other lifeforms; metal has a smell thanks to it helping oxygen oxidise blood in our nostrils, hence the ‘bloody’ smell — one must then wonder that to early humans our impression of the smell of metal would be that of blood and not the other way around. The second is that our senses were designed to be stimulated, and taste and smell are the machinery we have that bring us most in touch with the world on a molecular level. The same neurons that have assembled to let us do backflips and invent computers also have the ability to differentiate minute differences between thousands of molecules, allowing us a complex and multidimensional window from which to perceive the "osmocosm", the universe of scents, odors, and smells.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harold McGee is a geek and a nerd, in the very best sense of both of those more-often pejorative terms. Years ago, McGee wrote the definitive, best, most-useful and widely-hauled book on the chemistry of cooking: "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen." It went into two editions: 1984 and 2004. I have both of them. McGee is one of those rare science writers who can say scientific things in ways that non-scientists can understand and enjoy. And he has done it again in his latest effort: "Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World's Smells." He became fascinated with how odor works which fascination carried him through a decade of research. He explains how the sense of smell works, how the giving off of odors works, and moves easily between molecular chemistry and why bees like flowers. It was necessary for me to read this book slowly and in small bites in order to properly digest his offerings. "Nose Dive" is not likely to appeal to every reader but, for those attracted to the notion, it is likely the best book in the world on the subject.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

McGee explains that the book can be read several different ways and I can appreciate that he knows that this isn't a book that's a quick and easy read about smells- it's an in-depth investigative explanation about smells from around the world and what their building blocks are (and how similar they are to other smells that you might not think) based on their makeup and how they're disbursed into the volatiles that we smell.

He literally starts with the creation of the world, the big bang, and the volatiles in the air like we smell the volcanoes and the air and the stars, which was fascinating. He went all there including cat pee and semen and vanilla and fish. All around the world and all around the kitchen.

It was cool and his charts broke up the text but he used easy transitions, chapters, and headings and subheadings that could be useful if you were using sections (like on beer and wine) but wanted to skip the smells from the sea.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

While sometimes long on recitation of molecular compounds gleaned from the literature, McGee's book is ultimately a wide ranging natural history of things that smell.  He provides deep but focused and easy to understand background on everything from cosmology to chemistry, from fire to fermentation, from rocks to oysters.  So it is worth putting up with the sometimes rote repetition of the volatile chemicals contained in, say, asparagus, to learn the connections between things that smell and to learn what the smells of the world teach us about the way it came to be.  At 600 some dense pages, it is not an easy journey, but even the most pedantic parts bear at least a skim, and on the whole, it is a richly rewarding journey.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book from an unusual perspective: having congenital anosmia, I do not have - and NEVER had - a sense of smell. And I never will. I do not know what any of the myriad scents explored here are like. For foods I can maybe approximate from taste (yes, it’s more than just sweet/sour/salty/bitter but how much more, and how, is a mystery. Perhaps in the absence of one sense another was heightened.) but other things my friends and family mention like “the beach” or rain or a bonfire... no clue. So for me this book was a way to maybe get a little glimpse into what is missing from my world. And my science-nerd heart loves all the tables showing the different component smells so an item, and the molecules that are responsible.

[Vincent Pollard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very ambitious in scope and very detailed in its research. The first 25% is a bit boring but the other 75% is super interesting. Even the author knew the opening chapters weren’t as good as they should be as he kept suggesting skipping them, which is pretty irritating when you’ve paid for a book and the author is telling you not to read it! Another irritating thing was renaming petrichor ‘gaiachor’ and constantly referring to carbon as Hero Carbon, but I can overlook those petty annoyances. It’s a book you might read cover to cover once but will constantly refer back to.

[Michael McHugh]

I’m on page 132, and don’t know if I can continue … part of me just wants to throw the book across the room (a la Dorothy Parker)! As a scientist (organic chemist) his mis-representation of how evolution works is simply appalling — anthropomorphism runs riot throughout the text. “Hero Carbon” makes my skin crawl, and he more than once credits bacteria with having made amazing inventions. BACTERIA CANNOT “INVENT”. Evolution works by random mutation and natural selection. As a fan of his food writing, this is an incredibly disappointing and frustrating read.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Who else but Howard McGee would write an encyclopedia of smells?Who else but Howard McGee would start such an encyclopedia with the Big Bang? I put the book on the DNF shelf, but even the author wouldn't mind; he several times advises browsing points of interest rather than plowing through every page.

I would advise reading the first few chapters in order though. This will get you from the Big Bang to our living world, at least.

[DK Simoneau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm. I don’t know how I feel. This was interesting, especially in light of so many people losing their sense of smell because of Covid-19. It was encyclopedic. Fascinating yet boring. The author suggests skipping around which I ended up appreciating. I think for me what was missing was the how. How does one develop this increase pallet of scent recognition. How does one train themselves to recognize more and more in the world of scent. I guess it just wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.

[Mark A. Vierthaler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harold McGee creates a fascinating, well-researched, and beautifully written book about the chemistry behind the smells of the world.

It's a testament to McGee's talent as a writer - and passion for the subject - that something as seemingly dry as molecular chemistry could be written about so eloquently. While it can definitely be dense at times, for those with a deeper knowledge of the science of scents, it's required reading.

[Rudi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deze lezer zou het boek niet mogen beoordelen, omdat er wat aandachtsproblemen en andere dingen vochten in hoofd om een goed doordachte mening te kunnen geven ,
Een minder doordachte mening ,
Het boek kabbelde rustig door en de schrijver kan wel zijn passie mooi verwoorden, het is behoorlijk chemisch technisch , ik miste wel wat welke verschillende effecten geuren hebben en wat ze teweegbrengen , wel duidelijk beschreven hoe ze tot stand komen ,

[Shari · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a HUGE FAN of Harold McGee. I confess that I enjoy his food/cooking books more than this one, but that's probably because I enjoy food/eating/cooking so much. His writing is outstanding, as usual, but I am not easily grasping the underlying chemistry of scents, aromas, smells. It IS FUN to learn about smells of edibles, as well as other biological smells. I'm less enchanted by nonbiological smells.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An odd book to rate, but the best not-textbook I've read! But if you have very little background in chemistry like me, I do think it takes some dedication to get through cover to cover. Luckily, the writing throughout is lushly descriptive and accessible.

"I hope these chapters will prompt you to finger real pine needles or blades of grass, to stop and smell the roses, try different varieties of mint and apple, and seek out things you've never experienced before. As Thomas said of heaven, these pleasures are available all around us. [...] Curious and informed smelling can lift the dull shroud of familiarity so that we perceive plants and their creations afresh. It can also remind us of their significance in human culture: the scents of tree resin that inspire thoughts of deep time and immortality; ceremonial flowers that represent life's intensity, fragility, and brevity; fruits that, as carefully prepared and flavorful nourishment for creatures of a different kingdom, provide a model for cooperation-- and the gold standard for cooking." (187)

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is a very comprehensive study.The 30 page introduction sets up the story very well...but.. this is a very deep dive to the bottom of every odor known to mankind. I have learned a lot in the first 125 pages but I lack the stamina to plow through to the end.
I think I need the condensed version to get there.
This is a better book to own than to take from the library.

[Anil Shrivastava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun and facinating in a subject most people don't think about but affects everything we enjoy and also find horrible. Taste, emotions, picking up the scent of a season, alerting us to danger. Its amazing we have a molecule level detection system in our heads and no one really knows how it works so efficiently or accurately.

[Matt Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like a heel coming down on McGee. He's brilliant and articulate, and he knows his stuff. But I just can't figure out who this book is for. Readers comfortable with organic chemistry will often be bored, while those who are not well likely feel overwhelmed despite McGee's patient and clear explanations. The pride that opens each chapter is great, but there isn't enough of it.

[Cameron Mcconnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating account of the chemicals wafting from various substances in our environment. Full of information this reads a bit like a very interesting text book. I wish my chemistry classes were not 40 years ago. It did give me a new way of thinking about the odors wafting about and what they may represent. Will keep this for reread of various passages.

[Ovie James · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's was a fascinating read. I'll return to this encyclopedic field guide again and again when curious about a particular odor. Close family members or friends didn't really understand my seriousness, and were perhaps mildly amused, to see me deliberately rubbing a leaf then then smelling my finger tips or contemplating a long whiff of my dog's poop.