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Elspeth Davie is one of Scotland's finest and most underrated short-story writers. Her prose style is as clear and occasionally unnerving as that of Muriel Spark, yet her work reveals a gentler and more compassionate, but no less penetrating eye for the beauty and the strangeness of the daily human condition. This wide-ranging collection of the very best of Elspeth Davie's short fiction offers an important reassessment of a wonderful writer.
Asks whether two boys are making the noises that can be heard in and around the house.
"Describes the latest scientific research on smell, and explores its place in culture and history"--
The main purpose of the book is to provide insight into an area that humans often take for granted. There are wonderful and exciting stories of organisms using chemical signals as a basis of a sophisticated communication system. In many instances, chemical signals can provide more detailed and accurate information than any other mode of communication, yet this world is hidden from us because of our focus on visual and auditory signals. Although we have a diversity of senses available to us, humans are primarily auditory and visual animals. These stimuli are sent to the more cognitive areas of our brain where they are immediately processed for information. We use sounds to communicate and ...
Demos Health and the American Academy of Neurology Present a New Book for Patients with Smell and Taste Disorders Over 200,000 people visit doctors each year for smell and taste problems. Since our ability to smell and taste decreases with age, up to 14 million Americans aged 55 and older may live with these disorders, undiagnosed. Smell and taste disorders affect a person's ability to enjoy food and drink and may result in decreased appetite, weight loss, and too much added sugar and salt in the diet. In severe cases they may lead to depression. Smell and taste problems can also interfere with personal safety, limiting the ability to notice smoke and potentially harmful chemicals and gases....
Jim Henson's popular children's television show "Bear in the Big Blue House" comes to life as readers are treated to a colorful and scent-sational tour of Bear's home.
In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny, and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell's emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odour a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them, from paint and perfume to onions and farts. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, Tullett demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell's asocial-sociability, and its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society.
Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.
Demonstrates that sense of smell plays a significant role in the history of European literature
An extraordinary and beautifully illustrated exploration of the medieval world through twelve manuscripts, from one of the world's leading experts. Winner of The Wolfson History Prize and The Duff Cooper Prize. A San Francisco Chronicle Holiday Book Gift Guide Pick! Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts is a captivating examination of twelve illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period. Noted authority Christopher de Hamel invites the reader into intimate conversations with these texts to explore what they tell us about nearly a thousand years of medieval history - and about the modern world, too. In so doing, de Hamel introduces us to kings, queens, saints, scribes, artists, librarians, ...