Off the Shelf writer Meg Miller reviewed A Natural History of the Senses on OfftheShelf.com. Ode de Parfum: A Natural History of the Senses by Meg MillerOne of my most recounted stories comes from Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses. Whenever anyone mentions anything about a keen sense of smell, a perfume, or a familiar fragrance, I immediately launch into a diatribe describing the one thing I know about the fragrance industry. “Have you heard of IFF?” I begin.Located in New York City, International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. is responsible for creating almost any manufactured smell you can think of. Expensive perfumes, scratch-and-sniff strips, kitty litter, an amusement park’s “cave” odor, the smell of the Samoa exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History—nearly any smell that can be bottled and sold, IFF makes. Because the company may make perfumes for Chanel but also for Dior, the formulae for fragrances are coded by numbers and guarded so closely that even the lab employees don’t know what they’re mixing. The only ones who do know are the creators themselves: the Noses. Part mad scientist, part visionary artist, composers for a veritable orchestra of smells, the Noses are responsible for inventing some scents that are so ubiquitous we don’t even realize we’re smelling them.After I read A Natural History of the Senses, I had grand ambitions to be a Nose in my next life. Reading the rest of the book (and a few others, like The Moon by Whale Light), convinced me I’d much rather come back as Diane Ackerman. A naturalist and writer who has written for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and National Geographic, among others, Ackerman’s fearlessness and taste for adventure comes through in her prose. Put simply, she’s a badass—and she writes gorgeously, with the precision of a poet and the inquisitiveness of a journalist. In Natural History alone, she travels to the Amazonian rain forest, a glacier in Antarctica, Africa, Asia, Europe, and a college town in Ohio; at one point she is piloting her own plane, at another she’s witnessing a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral or talking to an iceberg. Ackerman references everything from Thomas Carlyle to Paul Cezanne to John Berger, and often likes to pause to examine the linguistic implications of the subject she’s dipping into. “Our language is steeped in metaphors of touch,” she says, our emotions are “feelings,” we are “touched” when something moves us deeply, people can be “prickly” and situations can become “sticky.”Through enchanting storytelling, Ackerman conducts a fascinating exploration of all five senses, gifts of nature that “define the edge of our consciousness.” Essentially, this is a book about living life sensuously and indulgently, and with enough awareness to “pause a moment and marvel.” Our senses crave novelty, Ackerman warns, the sweetest pleasures will lose their thrill if things stay static for too long. “We need to return to feeling the textures of life.”
I guess it helps if you have a crush on the author of the book you are reading. What can I say? It happens. But smitten or not, this was a delight. The first two books I reported on by poet turned naturalist Diane Ackerman chronicled her adventures in pursuit of rare and wonderful wildlife: bats, whales, penguins, etc. In “A Natural History of the Senses” she turned inward, exploring we humans and the way we experience our world.“We tend to see distant past through a reverse telescope that compresses it: a short time as hunter-gathers, a long time as “civilized” people. But civilization is a recent stage of human life, and, for all we know, it may not be any great achievement. It may not even be the final stage. We have been alive on this planet as recognizable humans for about two million years, and for all but the last two to three thousand we’ve been hunter-gathers. We may sing in choirs and park our rages behind a desk, but we patrol the world with many of a hunter-gather’s drives, motives, and skills,” writes Ackerman.“Consciousness, the great poem of matter, seems so unlikely, so impossible, and yet here we are with our loneliness and our giant dreams.”It really hasn’t been that long since we were sleeping in caves in family groups. A sumptuous read about our historic reliance on taste, touch, smell, sight and our sense of hearing to get us through our world unscathed and sated.
Do You like book A Natural History Of The Senses (1991)?
I guess it's not really fair to say I read this book... I guess I read about 85% of this book. The book itself went through a series of accidents... It got rained on, snowed on, coffee spilled on it... ran over, went through the laundry... you should see it. It truly looks USED in the true sense of the word. Anyway, at first I was in love with the writing, I thought it was fascinating. But by the end I was kind of tired of Ackerman's flowy over the top language usage and it seemed like every "chapter" was super-formulaic... that said, it's really interesting and there are things I really liked about it. Maybe I'll actually get around to finishing it some day. For now it's on my shelf because I think it needs a break from the elements... and if I take it anywhere, it may just fall apart.(So now it belongs in the unfinishable category.)
—Tara
Lavishly Written--Although somewhat haphazard in its structure, this nonfiction, quasi-scientific book by the poet Diane Ackerman dazzles you with sensuous extravaganza. Her prose indulges your senses with imagery, metaphors, and colorful descriptions that render sense data into poetic gems.The only complaint I have is that she doesn't have any overarching theme or story. Some accounts are more interesting than others and still some bore you with its randomness.When read as poetic expositions on the senses, the book transformed into a work of art worthy of emulation. As a writer, I learned a lot from this book and glad about it.Good stuff.
—Taka
It is no surprise that author Diane Ackerman has also written several books of poetry. Her poet's sensibility is certainly put to good use here. She uses beautiful, evocative prose to consummate what is clearly a long-standing love affair with the five senses. Although this book is well-reasoned and researched, including much fascinating information about how the senses operate, this is not really a rigorously scientific book. Rather, it is a collection of essays that often have little apparent connection to each other apart from the particular sense under discussion. One moment we might be reading about the latest (at the time of publication) scientific findings about our sense of smell; on the next page we may encounter profiles of people who work as professional smellers for the perfume industry; from there we might move to Ackerman's own garden or a memory of time spent in a eucalyptus grove. The result is an interesting, highly idiosyncratic journey through our senses and what they mean to us.
—David B
