Intimate and robust.
A tantalizing introduction to the world of fragrances.
A few years ago, British artist and journalist Lyttelton got the idea to have a perfume created for her. The memory of her grandmother’s “rich peppery and rose scent,” coupled with her own sense of adventure, inspired the author not only to have her own “bespoke” (custom-made) scent developed but to trace each of her fragrance’s “notes,” or elements, from their countries of origin to their finished state in her perfume. Lyttelton’s journey started with a perfumer in London and ended with the arrival from the lab of her personal fragrance, blended from the exotic ingredients she’d collected: “granules of frankincense and myrrh from Socotra; Indian vetivert and jasmine; the finest attars of roses from Turkey; a mimosa absolute from Grasse; Moroccan vials of neroli and petitgrain; Tuscan orris butter; Sri Lankan nutmeg oil; and, rarest of all, ambergris from the Arabian Sea.” The author’s olfactory odyssey provides the perfect forum for presenting an encyclopedic overview of the history of perfumery and introducing the layperson to the wonderfully sonorant lexicon comprising the language of the nose. No other context would be so apt for her provocative description of scents—the “buttery pulverulence” of mimosa, for example—and fascinating assemblage of perfume-related trivia. “Napoleon poured an entire bottle of cologne over his head every morning,” Lyttelton informs us. Later, we learn that “in the New Testament, Mary Magdalene anoints Christ’s feet with spikenard; the repentant prostitute became the patron saint of perfumers.” The author also conveys what she has learned about the cultural and literal value of her various scents in their native locales. In Socotra, “toddlers had pouches of myrrh pinned to their bibs to ward off illness and evil spirits”; in Morocco, the very rich literally eat perfume, “so that their whole body smells of scent from within”; and in Tuscany, orris absolute costs about $40,000 per kilo, “three times more than its own weight in gold.”
Intimate and robust.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22624-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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