Books about Enigmatic from Amazon.com

Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But if you cannot smell, does the rose lose its sweetness?

The first and definitive book on the psychology of smell, The Scent of Desire traces the importance of smell in our lives, from nourishment to procreation to our relationships with the people closest to us and the world at large. Smell was the very first sense to evolve and is located in the same part of the brain that processes emotion, memory, and motivation. To our ancestors, the sense of smell wasn't just important, it was crucial to existence and it remains so today. Our emotional, physical, even sexual lives are profoundly shaped by both our reactions to and interpretations of different smells.

Why do some people like a certain smell and others hate it? Is smell personal or cultural? How does smell affect our choices and our daily lives? Rachel Herz explores these questions and examines the role smell plays in our lives, and how this most essential of senses is imperative to our physical and emotional well-being. Herz investigates how our sense of smell functions, examines what purpose it serves, and shows how inextricably it is linked to our survival. She introduces us to people who have lost their ability to smell and shows how their experiences confirm this sense's importance by illuminating the traumatic effect its loss has on the quality of day-to-day living. Herz illustrates how profoundly scent and the sense of smell affect our daily lives with numerous examples and personal accounts based on her years of research.

The wonders of our sense of smell are all explored in a compelling and engaging manner, from emotions and memory to aromatherapy and pheromones. For anyone who has ever wondered about human nature or been curious about the secrets of both the body and the mind, The Scent of Desire is a fascinating, down-to-earth tour of the psychology and biology of our most neglected sense, the sense of smell.

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"Haunting, cryptic photographs…fire the imagination The images come with no explanation, only speculation, so we are free to let our minds roam wild." —Miami Herald

The wonderfully diverse images reproduced here include many of transcendent beauty and psychological insight, all with the magical, mysterious charge that comes from speculating on the circumstances in which they were taken. Novelist William Boyd, whose introduction identifies thirteen ways in which to look at photographs, explains: "The anonymous photograph…makes us ask, with new concentration, what it is about a photograph that elevates it above the casual and the banal…why some images move and enthrall and remain in our memories."

The number of collectors of anonymous photographs is growing exponentially. Robert Flynn Johnson has spent more than a decade on a personal journey of discovery through what were previously uncharted waters to find the works reproduced here. Reflecting themes that govern our lives—birth, death, love, war, travel, celebrity—these photographs are pleasurable and poignant, giving insight into the human secrets with which we can all identify. Over 220 illustrations..
Price: $17.98 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This irascible genius, this diminutive egghead scientist, known to the world as “The Thinking Machine,” is no less than the newly rediscovered literary link between Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe: Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, who—with only the power of ratiocination—unravels problems of outrageous criminous activity in dazzlingly impossible settings. He can escape from the inescapable death-row “Cell 13.” He can fathom why the young woman chopped off her own finger. He can solve the anomaly of the phone that could not speak. These twenty-three Edwardian-era adventures prove (as The Thinking Machine reiterates) that “two and two make four, not sometimes, but all the time.”.
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Explosive and revealing, this history of a highly visible yet traditionally tight-lipped federal agency by Philip Melanson, acclaimed scholar of political violence and governmental secrecy, explores the long-hidden workings of the Secret Service since its inception in 1865. Rigorous research, photographs, and extensive interviews with former White House staffers, retired agents, Service training dropouts, and the first female agent on presidential detail uncover little-known, frequently astonishing facts about the Service's role in traumatic national events of the past century, notably among them the assassination of JFK and the shooting of President Reagan. Included, too, are revelations about presidential demands on the agency; alcoholism, divorce, and burnout among agents; the Service's inexplicable failure to develop profiles of potential assassins; and its institutionalization of the gender gap. Assailing the public image of the Secret Service as a highly professional apolitical organization, Melanson examines the often-detrimental influence that politics privately exerts on the agency, epitomized by Kenneth Starr's efforts to use agents' testimony against President Clinton in the impeachment hearings. Nor does Melanson overlook the profound new challenge facing the Secret Service, now a branch of the Homeland Security Department, in a post-9/11 world where brazen new assassination methods and terrorist plots proliferate..
Price: $1.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]