The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things [Hardcover]

As dull as dust, you might think, until you read a fascinating and wide-ranging science account, _The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things_ ((John Wiley & Sons) by Hannah Holmes, and realize that dust is certainly universal, and is often a nuisance, but it is also a basic cosmic building block. It is hard to imagine any facet of dust that Holmes has not covered in remarkable detail. House dust is here, of course. Everyone carries around a personal cloud of dust, made of skin cells and clothes fibers, but mostly composed of unknowns. Some of this turns into house dust, which has a surprising complex ecology of fungi and dust mites which feed upon it, and tiny, fierce pseudoscorpions that feed upon the mites. But thinking of dust as some domestic phenomenon is a bit parochial. Try thinking cosmic. Holmes goes back to the Big Bang, which scattered matter all over, in unimaginably thin concentrations. The dust grains gathered, and formed places for atoms to meet and make molecules. That made the sun, the earth, and of course, us. Space dust is therefore of increasing interest to cosmologists, the target now of various probes that are supposed to gather the dust out there and bring it home uncontaminated.

It has become alarmingly clear that dust pays little attention to national boundaries. Oriental countries have had booming technologies run mostly on coal for electricity and diesel for transport. In China, one out of fourteen deaths is due to noxious dusts, and its crops are flagging because they dont get as much sun as they used to. It is only recently that we have discovered that the problem dusts of Asia are our problem, too. The Asian Express makes regular deliveries of Gobi Desert and industrial dusts to the American northeast. The Sahara desert sends its dusts to the eastern US about three times a summer, maybe with bacteria. And the US dusts go to other countries, and it is all one big swaparound. There are rivers of dust in the air, rivers that have flowed since long before we knew of any such things. They are now bigger because of drought and land abuse, and now they carry a freight of DDT, PCBs, and other pollutants that we magnanimously thought we were only dumping onto our own national soils. We at least know now that if we are going to protect countries from poisonous dusts, we are going to have to have a global program to do so, but whether that knowledge will actually inspire such a program is not at all clear.

In an amusing last chapter, Holmes emphasizes that to dust we shall return. She summarizes the efforts of the arts of the embalmer and casketmaker only to show that dust is our destiny no matter what. Some of us will rush the job, being burned into ash quickly after death. It is all well and good for family members to scatter that dust in a garden or at sea, but not too terribly imaginative. For a fee, various companies will turn that dust into keepsake brooches, duck decoys, bowling balls, fireworks, or fishing rods. It doesnt make any ultimate difference. The sun is getting hotter every day, and will eventually turn to hot dust all living things on our planet, and then Earth itself will get sucked into the maw of the red-giant sun, finally to become dust again. Well, take heart. That people can pull together this many interesting facts and stories about mere dust is one of the things that means that the ride between beginning dust and final dust is intrinsically worth taking.

"Everything counts in large amounts." -Depeche Mode

Science writer Hannah Holmes uses the Biblical "dust to dust" adage as a thread weaving through her eleven easy to read chapters, beginning with a sort of overview in Chapter 1. We begin as stardust, and it is to stardust we shall return. Eventually. In Chapter 2, "Life and Death among the Stars," she introduces cosmic dust and in Chapter 3 shows it falling on the earth from outer space: forty thousand tons of it every year, almost all of it in a fine rain. (p. 33) Then there are three chapters on how dust moves around on our planet and how it affects the weather, the life cycles of plants and animals, our economies and our health. There is an excursion into the past in Chapter 7 to answer the question, "Did Dust Do in the Ice Age?" Chapter 8 is about the continuous fall of atmospheric dust onto land, ocean and ice. It is finally in Chapter 9 that Holmes considers the dust in our neighborhoods, and then in Chapter 10, "Microscopic Monsters and Other Indoor Devils," she gets to the topic of primary interest to most readers, the dust under the bed, in the rug, and on the floor. The final chapter is about the dust of our bodies after we are dead, and then after the sun explodes and we are once again stardust.

This is a fascinating read that unlike most books becomes more interesting the further into it one gets. It may change the way you view the world. Seeing our planet and its history from the point of view of dust sheds an entirely different light on things. The very small things in enormous numbers affect our lives in ways that surprise and astound. Consider the sheer volume and weight of dust that swirls around in the atmosphere, with massive tons of it held aloft to cross oceans and continents. That story alone is mind boggling. Here I learned that the coral islands of the Caribbean developed their soil not from the breakdown of the islands themselves, but from the sand that fell on them over millions of years from the Sahara Desert thousands of miles away!

This, the relatively unknown story of dust is a story of dust hunters who collect and analyze the minute particles from all over the planet to determine their origin and how they affect the various environments. Dust hunters even drill into the arctic and the antarctic to reconstruct the story of dust laid down in the past. They can tell by the composition of dust where it came from. Saharan dust, for example, is particularly heavy in iron and phosphorous. In fact, the microbes in dust, the viruses, the fungi and the bacteria, can betray its origin.

Holmes considers some hot topics in science along the way, including global warming and the explosion in asthma in the United States and Europe in recent decades and how dust may or may not be the cause. Deadly dusts containing asbestos, quartz, coal, etc. are considered as well as the danger of working with materials containing them. Why talcum powder is no longer dusted on babies and how working with pigs and wheat and other farm products can be hazardous to your health is revealed. The deadly effect of dust getting into the lungs is explained--how macrophages can and cannot engulf and get rid of various substances and how people die from a host of diseases caused by inhaling the wrong kind of dust. And Holmes doesn't disappoint when it comes to the story of household dust. The chapter on indoor dust is absolutely fascinating and a bit scary.

Some other things I learned is how dust heats or cools the planet as it floats in the air or lands on ocean, land or ice; how epidemics can be triggered by migrating dust containing disease spores; how a bloom of algae can follow a download of iron-bearing dust from a desert half a world away; even how we carry around with us our own personal and distinctive cloud of dust.

Some readers I suspect will grow impatient with all the science and want to know about their own dust. I know I felt that way when I opened the book. But I am glad I read the whole thing, because what I learned about dust makes me shake my head in wonder. This is an information-packed book. There's no padding, and everything is vividly expressed.

Dust. There's a lot of it. We don't know much about it. If you want to hear that repeated for a couple hundred pages, buy this book. There's a lot of airy speculation and to be fair, there are a few interesting pieces of trivia thrown in... but for the most part, this book drags.

There are some writers who can make any topic interesting, like Bill Bryson. I don't think Hannah Holmes is one of them. I gave up on the book about 3/4 of the way through. After the intro, it just felt like she was saying the same thing, over and over. Space dust? We don't know much about it! Desert dust? It's a mystery! Smoke? That's dust, too, and we also know very little about it! And on, and on...

'Dust' is an interesting choice for the title. I might call what Holmes is writting about 'matter', not 'dust'. She's not talking about the stuff you clean up with Pledge; she's talking about anything that ever gets broken down into little pieces, which is pretty much everything. That's not a plus or minus for the book; it's just meant to set your expectations better than I think her title does.

If her writing were more interesting, I would have added a couple more stars. If she could have provided more information, I might have gone up to 5 stars. But as it stands, the book gets 2 stars from me because it's not horrible and it has some interesting trivia, but I wouldn't go any higher. It's not at all compelling. I can't think of anyone I would recommend this to.

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