This book is a tribute to the free sense of smell in all its beauty and disgust.
The sense of smell is associated with the dark, the unruly, the erotic, the antisocial, the primitive—the very opposite of modernity and progress. When the senses fall into mutual imbalance and individual senses are suppressed or overwhelmed, we risk hallucinations taking over. We begin to invent our lives. This is unsettling in a time when the value of improvisation and the revelation of false information may prove more important than ever.
The book begins with an introduction to the significance of the sense and the adventurous diversity of odors, and continues as an olfactory historical journey through the earliest urban formations of antiquity, through the medieval plague epidemics and the industrial revolution, up to the present day. Along the way, we are introduced specifically to twenty smells that still play an important role in human life, from the smell of blood to the scent of flower meadows, farts, money, and garlic.
Bjørn Berge offers us yet another treasure trove of insight and reflection. The text sharpens your senses and makes you appreciate the endless variety the world has to offer, which powerful forces are recklessly striving to flatten, homogenize, and standardize.
Dagbladet
Although odours are everywhere and we perceive them constantly, we only have a very limited vocabulary to describe them. For this reason alone, it is absolutely necessary to bring a book about the sense of smell onto the market.
Martin Lindh, Publisher Haupt Verlag
We have already published two books written by Bjørn Berge. We love nonfiction that has a special uniqueness to it. Berge’s books are a guarantee for mind-blowing facts, presented with expertise in a refined writing style.
Cser Kiadó, Hungary
This invention is so good that one can turn yellow with envy: writing a book about a country that no longer exists. … Each country is devoted to just four pages, and on these are unrolled shocking world history, lyrical descriptions and subtle details … an exceptionally beautiful book.
Author Erika Fatland, for Aftenposten, on Nowherelands
Exuberantly cheerful and wise, packed with surprising facts.
Dagbladet, on Nowherelands
