Rachel Herz's THE SCENT OF DESIRE Reviewed in Seattle Times

"The Scent of Desire" | Intriguing analysis of smell
By Alan Moores,
Seattle Times, November 18, 2007

"The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell"
by Rachel Herz
Morrow, 288 pp., $24.95

What better praise to give a nonfiction book than to say it will transform the way its readers think about its subject. In Rachel Herz's case, the subject is our sense of smell.

Herz, a visiting professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University, is one of the world's leading researchers in this young field, and one of the field's better explainers, variously turning up in The New Yorker or NPR or U.S. News & World Report to share her findings.

In "The Scent of Desire," she starts with the notion of inherently "bad" smells. They don't exist, she argues, offering as evidence, among other things, her own love of skunk essence, or infants' acceptance — even love? — of the smell of feces, or our military's failure to develop an all-purpose stink bomb, even in using "U.S. Army issue latrine scent."

Likewise, she debunks the notion of any inherently "healthful" smells in, say, aromatherapy. She doesn't discount its use in a relaxing environment — say, in a hot bath or on a massage table — but adds: "there is no scientific evidence in humans that by inhaling sandalwood aroma the essence of sandalwood is detectable in the bloodstream — which it would have to be if it were producing a pharmacological effect."

For the rest of the review, please click here.