A Feast in Every Sense: The Mystery, Marvel, and New Science of Our Senses Book Review and Summary
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Lucia Garcia - 02 Sep, 2026 04:42
Author: Diane Ackerman
Page Count: Unknown
Publication Date: Expected publication 2026 APL
We are expected to swoon over the tactile musings of Diane Ackerman yet again. Decades after A Natural History of the Senses graced the mahogany coffee tables of the adequately cultured, we are gifted A Feast in Every Sense. Or rather, we are promised it for twenty-six. A grueling exercise in patience.
The Anatomy of a Sensation
The synopsis reads like an ambitious syllabus for a seminar at the Sorbonne that nobody actually finishes. We are told of avocados yielding creamy ecstasies. We are threatened with acoustics that dictate the temperature of bathwater. But spare me the platitudes about skin sensors lowering pain during a lover’s touch. This sounds dangerously close to the prose one finds embroidered on throw pillows in Chelsea flats.
Yet, I suppose the market demands its morsels.
The Weight of a Hard Chair
Consider the grand inquiries posed by the advance material. Why does sitting in a hard chair make one a ruthless negotiator? Why does Tylenol steal our capacity for pity? One fears the intellectual rigor of this enterprise rivals the nutritional value of a can of New Coke. It flirts with popular science in the most distressing way—reductive, shiny, and engineered solely to be quoted in Sunday supplements by accountants who fancy themselves bohemians.
And Ackerman expects us to revere these “secret scouts” of perception. As if our nervous systems were undiscovered Amazonian tribes waiting for a naturalist with a fountain pen to catalog their misbehaving mitochondria.
One suspects the prose will be dripping with adjectives. Too many adjectives. A relentless cascade of tactile descriptors designed to compensate for an absence of actual argument. Give me the austere despair of a Thomas Bernhard sentence any day over this relentless, exhausting optimism about the miracle of being alive. Some of us prefer the numbness.
The Grand Soirée
We shall see if the finished volume transcends its own promotional apparatus. But my expectations remain subterranean. The guest list for the publisher’s summer salon on the terrace requires immediate pruning. I simply cannot tolerate the architectural editor bringing her third husband again.
