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"A brilliant, feisty scientist at the center of a nasty, back-stabbing, utterly absorbing, cliff-hanging scramble for the Nobel Prize. The Emperor of Scent is a quirky, wonderful book."

 -John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"The Emperor of Scent is a gem of a book - a suspense story about a man of super-human powers, justifiably arrogant, dangerously steeped in hubris, and a real-life hero. I tumbled into this story, immediately engrossed, and fell in love with Luca Turin, irreverent, witty, imaginative, determined, elitist without a trace of snobbery, and above all a creative genius. Chandler Burr is a magician himself. He strikes me as a man we should all be so lucky to have at a dinner party, weaving perfect asides (the story of Mrs. Rippard's strange smell disease and the molecular structure of Chanel 5 and L'Air du Temps) into this incredible cautionary tale for all who assume the scientific world exists in a sterile vacuum of indisputable test results."

- Alexandra Fuller, author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

Kirkus Reviews
Starred review (A star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.)

"An elegant analysis of one man's work in deciphering the sense of smell.

Raised in France, Luca Turin is happy to admit that "the idea that things should be slightly dirty, overripe, slightly fecal is everywhere in France." Given a stinky cheese, says he, Americans think, "Good God!"; Japanese think, "I must now commit suicide"; and the French think, "Where's the bread?" So perhaps it's not surprising that Turin should be captivated by the sense of smell, and, with his polymath background in science, arrive at a theory of how it works, the last sense to be cracked- though still to be universally recognized as such. But journalist Burr is a believer in Turin's theory, and he presents his work in the best possible light, even its rejection by the prestigious magazine Nature, whose referees' comments he nimbly dissects and hangs out to dry as a combination of stung egos and vested interests. The theory introduces a whole new wrinkle to what is known about molecular recognition, though the lay audience, happy to have made it through the intelligible science, will be happier still when the spotlight falls on Turin himself, an appealing and genuine maverick who, in bringing quantum mechanics to a physiological problem (and crossing covetously guarded frontiers), invited the wrath of academics, not to mention of chemists at the Big 7 producers of artificial scents, who might greet his smell-prediction algorithm much as the Luddites welcomed mechanization. (It's interesting to compare the openness of scientific inquiry in Russia and India with its equivalent in Europe and America.) Burr unravels the story, with all its beard-pulling and molecular blacksmithing, its megahertz and neurobiology, with grace, an eye for the intelligent human-interest angle, and a steady tincture of bright humor."

Review of The Emperor of Scent in The New York Times