Also of interest... senses and sensibilities

Smells

(Polity, $ 25)

We’re lucky we don’t live in the time when urine barrels and horse corpses littered the street, said Rebecca Onion in Slate.com. But we live in a culture shaped by the resulting stench. In this “disgusting, delicious” book about the smells of pre-1789 France, historian Robert Muchembled mixes amusing olfactory trivia with a determination to understand the ways that those odors changed gender and class relationships. “As diversionary history to read in a pandemic summer goes, this is a good one.”

Out of My Skull

“Don’t let boredom bring you down,” said Eric Cortellessa in Washington Monthly. This book, by a pair of psychologists, “offers an essential insight”: Boredom isn’t to be fought; it’s to be listened to. Boredom, they say, always stems from a crisis of agency—of feeling insufficiently engaged and effective—and thus is our brain’s way of telling us to change what we’re doing. Out of My Skull is “at its strongest” when deconstructing boredom and describing the right type of response.

On Nostalgia

(Coach House, $16)

Nostalgia has become a huge cultural force, but it didn’t start that way, said Robert Wiersema in the Toronto Star. David Berry’s thought-provoking new book tells us that yearning for the past was once considered a disease so virulent that Russian doctors prescribed burying the afflicted alive. Though the book is slim, “Berry’s writing is complex and layered” and “leavened with a sly wit.” He has provided “a rigorous unpacking of a term and an experience which we have long taken for granted.”

22 Minutes of Unconditional Love

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26)

Daphne Merkin’s novel about an accomplished editor’s intense affair with an older man “recalls not only the frank carnality of Updike and Roth but also of Erica Jong,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. Judith Stone knows she might be making a mistake, because her lover is manipulative and lewd, but Merkin isn’t offering a cautionary tale about sexual desire. “The stupid, youthful abandon of the fling is what, to her, makes it worthy of tribute.”