A beautiful book about beautiful things, with a fascinating narrative told by an author who loves her subject.
The world of perfumes is a universe all its own, and Aftel’s book is a colorful, authoritative guide.
There are some authors who know everything there is to know about their field. Aftel, author of Fragrant and Essence and Alchemy, is one of them, and the result is this sumptuous book. She is a creator of bespoke perfumes and has an impressive client list. In 2017, she opened a small museum at her home in Berkeley, California, called the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents, to educate people about the history and culture of perfumes. Her latest book is another step in this project, cataloguing her collection of essences and oils, as well as prints, photographs, and maps. She disdains the trend toward artificial scents, arguing that only natural perfumes can provide true aromatic beauty. Her exploration of the origin of each ingredient features an exquisite drawing, with categories of flowers, woods, leaves and grasses, and resins, and an account of the painstaking distilling processes. Aftel explains how a perfume is created through the careful balancing of three “chords” that might require dozens of components, measured at the molecular level. Her museum also houses collections of antique perfume bottles and evocative recipe books. “It’s not that the world of scent contains these objects so much as they contain the world,” writes the author. “This world kindles a sense of shared humanity that transcends the boundaries of culture and travels down through the eras. It shakes us out of our usual way of responding to the modern world, as a lifeless place; the universe of aromatics has the power to vivify our very being.” This is an inspiring view, founded in nature and enhanced by artistry. This book could be read straight through or dipped into randomly. Many readers will want to sample the fragrances that Aftel describes.
A beautiful book about beautiful things, with a fascinating narrative told by an author who loves her subject.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780789214713
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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