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Title: Delightful digressions
Review: A collection of delightful and digressive essays about smelling, tasting, touching, hearing and seeing. It's meant for entertainment rather than solid instruction. (Read my "Psychiatry of Stroke" to get the anatomy and physiology). Ackerman covers some of the science but there are no illustrations, tables or references (except for a list of books for further reading at the end) and it leans to the humanities rather than technology. My copy has a 1990 publication date and I don't know if it's been revised. There's nothing about the discoveries concerning the sense of smell that brought Linda Buck and Richard Axel the 2004 Nobel Prize.The prose style is something you might love or hate, with many complex sentences and unusual words and much display of erudition. Some of the insights were brilliant and original but I would agree with the reviewer who found some of them to be platitudes.
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