The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and...

The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Alain Corbin (Harvard), explores “with imagination and audacity the changing role of smell in the anxieties and antagonisms of the modern world” (Michael Burns).

Broken Shore: The Marin Peninsula in California History, Arthur Quinn (Redwood Press, P.O. Box 776, Inverness, Calif. 94937). Arthur Quinn “not only retrieves Marin from Cyra McFadden’s satiric grasp but also provides significant observations about European expansion as he gracefully peels layers from the past” (Gerald Haslam).

This Magic Moment, Gregg Easterbrook (St. Martin’s). Nora and Warren have fallen madly in love when Nora informs Warren that she’s already married. Easterbrook’s thesis in this “funny, appealing and original” book is that “yes, there is such a thing as love, and we are in it, right at this magic moment” (Carolyn See).

Comfort, David Michael Kaplan (Viking). “Most of the stories concern parents and children, their gulfs and griefs.” David Kaplan “is a writer who cares enormously--not only about his characters and their pain, but about their accommodation . . . he treats them with a sensibility that could glow in the dark” (Richard Eder).