The Emperor of Scent is a gem of a book - a suspense story about a man of super-human powers, justifiably arrogant, dangerously steeped in hubris, and a real-life hero. I tumbled into this story, immediately engrossed, and fell in love with Luca Turin, irreverent, witty, imaginative, determined, elitist without a trace of snobbery, and above all a creative genius. Chandler Burr is a magician himself. He strikes me as a man we should all be so lucky to have at a dinner party, weaving perfect asides (the story of Mrs. Rippard's strange smell disease and the molecular structure of Chanel 5 and L'Air du Temps) into this incredible cautionary tale for all who assume the scientific world exists in a sterile vacuum of indisputable test results.
NEWS : "The 40-year-old Mr. Everett was raised in McLean, Va., with his sister Elizabeth, mother Nancy and father Hugh Everett III, a quantum physicist who in 1957 proposed a formal theory of parallel universes known as 'The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.' 'Everett's work has boggled minds inside and outside physics for more than four decades,' reported Scientific American in last month's issue.
Mr. Everett said his brilliant father wasn't communicative at home. When I asked him what the conversation was like around the breakfast table, he replied, 'There wasn't any.'
'Physicists and geniuses don't always make great family men. I lived with him for 18 years and I learned more about him from the Internet.'
Mr. Everett's family was a heartrending source of inspiration for his most notable work, the 1998 album 'Electro-Shock Blues' (DreamWorks), written after his sister committed suicide and h...
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