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    Unavailable
    The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Sense
    Unavailable
    The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Sense
    Unavailable
    The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Sense
    Ebook307 pages7 hours

    The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Sense

    By Barney Shaw

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Smell is the most emotional and evocative of our senses: it can bring back memories faster and with more immediacy than a photograph – so why is it so little understood?



    Armed with a hungry curiosity and a willingness to self-experiment, author Barney Shaw goes in search of the hidden meanings of smells. Using plain words to describe what he finds, he investigates the chemistry, psychology, history and future of this underappreciated sense.



    Journeying around boatyards, perfume shops and memories, Shaw opens your nose to the world, breaking down “chords” of smells into their component notes and through them revealing new ways of understanding the spaces through which we move.



    An investigation into the biology, psychology and history of smell, and a search for effective ways to put into words scents that we instantly relate to, but find strangely ineffable, THE SMELL OF FRESH RAIN includes a 200-entry thesaurus of succinct descriptions of common smells.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books
    Release dateSep 7, 2017
    ISBN9781785781148
    Unavailable
    The Smell of Fresh Rain: The Unexpected Pleasures of our Most Elusive Sense

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    Reviews for The Smell of Fresh Rain

    3.5/5

    4 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      When Barney Shaw's autistic son asked him what 3 O'clock in the morning smells like, he genuinely didn't know how to answer him. His son is a musical genius who has synaesthesia, so he decided the best way to answer this was to get up at that time and head out on to the streets of London, visiting Billingsgate and New Covent Garden to discover from themselves what the scents and smells are around that time of the morning.

      It got him thinking though, how do we smell? What do we smell and do we smell the same things as everyone else? To answer what seems to be a set of simple questions is going to take a lot of unravelling. It will take him to the coast and boatyards, into Harrods to smell the food and the most expensive perfume in the world. Down to Dorset to a charcoal burner, to try and get a grip of the complexity of the aroma of coffee and baffling the owners of a hardware shop as he asks to smell the products. Occasionally he ventures back into history to learn about the big stink and the time when parliament decided that they couldn't bear the smell from the Thames. All this makes him thirsty, so a trip to the pub is called for, to smell the beer and the crisps and run a little experiment with those in the bar.

      Shaw's considered and curious prose makes this book, on what most would consider the weakest of our senses, endlessly fascinating. His journey around the more aromatic places searching for the scents that tell a story, or evoke memories from many years ago has ended up with him compiling a list of 200 or so different things along with different elements of that particular item described. It is not academically rigorous, but that shouldn't take anything away from this fine musing on scents and smells.
    • 3/5
      Fun, interesting and different but not an important addition to most collections.