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Review
"Amato's elegant little book not only scrutinizes dust, but reaches out to examine the history of the small and invisible, in general.... A diverting, thought-provoking amalgam of science, literature, intellectual and social history. Playful yet serious, Amato's supple prose conveys the hidden poetry of his subject." - Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times "Amato writes well; he is a litterateur, an elegant stylist and, presumably, a good historian. Clearly, though, Amato is no scientist.... I'm sure many lay readers will find this book entertaining." - Ralph Lewin, Nature "This one won't sit on your coffee table collecting, well, eponymous stuff." - Chicago Tribune, Editor's Choice "Both suggestive and well written. It is also printed on beautiful acid-free paper, to prevent it from turning into dust." - Daily Telegraph (UK) "A brisk social, medical, and philosophical overview of humanity's relationship to the small and invisible." - Wendy Law-Yone, Washington Post "Amato's penetrating history provides a unique perspective on how greatly we have altered our environment and perhaps our nature, bringing new poignancy to the recognition that from dust we came and to dust we shall return." - Donna Seaman, Booklist "The very inventions that brought light, heat, running water, and sanitation to society created new miasmas and particulate matter to darken and poison the earth.... [Amato] has forcefully underscored just how much humankind has both suffered and feared, celebrated and revered, the visible world of dust." - Kirkus
Product Description
While the story of the big has often been told, the story of the small has not yet even been outlined. With "Dust", Joseph Amato enthralls the reader with the first history of the small and the invisible. "Dust" is a poetic meditation on how dust has been experienced and the small has been imagined across the ages. Examining a thousand years of Western civilization - from the naturalism of medieval philosophy, to the artistry of the Renaissance, to the scientific and industrial revolutions, to the modern worlds of nanotechnology and viral diseases - "Dust" offers a savvy story of the genesis of the microcosm. "Dust", which fills the deepest recesses of space, pervades all earthly things. Throughout the ages it has been the smallest yet the most common element of everyday life. Of all small things, dust has been the most minute particulate the eye sees and the hand touches. Indeed, until this century, dust was simply accepted as a fundamental condition of life; like darkness, it marked the boundary between the seen and the unseen. With the full advent of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and social control, dust has been partitioned, dissected, manipulated, and even invented. In place of traditional and generic dust, a highly diverse particulate has been discovered and examined. Like so much else that was once considered minute, dust has been magnified by the twentieth-century transformations of our conception of the small. These transformations - which took form in the laboratory through images of atoms, molecules, cells, and microbes - defined anew not only dust and the physical world but also the human body and mind. Amato dazzles the reader with his account of how this powerful microcosm challenges the imagination to grasp the magnitude of the small, and the infinity of the finite. This is "Los Angeles Times" Best Nonfiction Book of 2000.
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In times before industry, when agriculture dominated, men and women were intimate with dust in ways beyond contemporary imagination. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
In times before industry, when agriculture dominated, men and women were intimate with dust in ways beyond contemporary imagination. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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7 reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Ashes to Ashes, Kudos to Dust
6 April 2000
Format:Hardcover
Did you know that each year 332 tons of dust falls on every square mile of Los Angeles? Or that more than twice this amount (782 tons) falls on every square mile of Chicago during the same period? Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible is chockful of such arcana!
Don't get the wrong impression, though. This book is anything but a dry treatise detailing the amount of dust hovering above and raining down over all of us, all we see. The role dust played in humankind's reaction to various airborne diseases (prior to the acceptance of the germ theory at the beginning of the twentieth century) is but one of the many polymathic delights awaiting a reader of this fine book.
A friend lent me a copy of this book to read while I was on vacation recently, and I liked it so much that I just HAD to get a copy for myself. I highly, highly, highly recommend this book!
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Let's Get Small!
29 Mar 2000
Format:Hardcover
Reading Joseph Amato's "Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible" is both an eye- and a mind-opening experience. His introduction, entitled "Little Things Mean a Lot," sets the stage for a fascinating discussion of the subtle and profound ways dust (in all its myriad forms) has settled--for better AND worse--humankind's hash throughout history. I especially liked the chapter entitled "Atoms and Microbes: New Guides to the Small and Invisible." I took a chance on this book, hoping that I would come away with a new appreciation of the stuff most of us consider a nuisance.... I did, in spades.
11 of 14 people found the following review helpful
A strange and fascinating book
25 Oct 2000
Format:Hardcover
So much of our world's business energy and investment capital go into information technology and biotechnology, which are fields where most of the important technology is so small as to be invisible to normal human vision. Author Amato explores how the human drive to improve our lives and our world led us (from the 16th century on) to see, measure, manipulate and control ever smaller particles and entities. The mysteries of dust, and then germs, then atoms, and now subatomic particles, viruses and prions, one by one "bit the dust" as they were revealed by this compelling quest. Bearing an amazing array of facts and stories (like the best musty and dusty library stacks I remember from college) as well as an approach both philisophic and humane, Amamto is an entertaining guide on this journey from bulbonic plague to Hoover vacuums to semiconductor plant clean rooms. I think his book helps explain the deep hopes and fears (and the high market valuations) our age invests in our interaction with unseen.
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