McGee, Harold: Nose Dive

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 BEST BOOKS OF 2020: SCIENCE - FINANCIAL TIMES SHORTLSTED FOR THE ANDRE SIMON AWARD The long awaited new book from Harold McGee, winner of the André Simon Food Book of the Year & the James Beard Award. What is smell? How does it work? And why is it so important? HAROLD McGEE , leading expert on the science of food and cooking, has spent a decade exploring our most overlooked sense. Nose Dive is the amazing result: it takes us on an adventure across four billion years and the whole globe, from the sulphurous early Earth to the fruit-filled Tian Shan mountain range north of the Himalayas, and back to the keyboard of your laptop, where trace notes of phenol and formaldehyde are escaping between the keys. A work of astounding scholarship and originality, Nose Dive distils the science behind smells and translates it into an accessible and entertaining sensory and olfactory guide. We‘ll sniff the ordinary ( wet pavement and cut grass ) and extraordinary ( ambergris and truffles ), the delightful ( roses and vanilla ) and the challenging ( swamplands and durians ). We‘ll smell each other. We‘ll smell ourselves. Here is a story of the world, of all of the smells under our noses. DIVE IN!