Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #437281 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-27
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .68" h x 6.20" w x 9.18" l, .76 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Leave it to an accomplished science writer like Hannah Holmes to unearth so much about so little in The Secret Life of Dust. Zooming in on one of the great, often unnoticed constants of life on Earth--dust, in all its myriad forms--Holmes traverses biology, astronomy, climatology, pathology, and a host of other fields to dig up the serious dirt. Because while dust might be vital to life on our planet (and may, in fact, even be responsible for it), this "heartless little brute" could also be responsible for the deaths of millions. And she's not talking about dinosaurs (or at least not just yet.)

Tackling her topic roughly by the different roles that dust plays, Holmes alternately devotes chapters to specks of space dust ("They're everywhere," gushes one scientist she interviews, " ... you eat them all the time. Any carpet would have 'em"); Oviraptor-burying desert dust, particles of dust that go up instead of down (like sea salt and soot); and foreign pollution that heeds no borders (apparently, "Beijing fog" can be bad enough to cause traffic accidents). She saves the best for last with a couple of chapters on "unsavoury characters" and "microscopic monsters", finding danger in the obvious (cigarettes and vermiculite mines) and the not so obvious (hot tubs and humidifiers). And you don't even want to know what's in pig dust.

We're swimming in it, we're covered with it, we might very well have come from it, and--surely, eventually--we'll become it. So we really don't have much an excuse for not knowing more about it. Thankfully, Holmes is there, in the field and in the lab, with wide-eyed curiosity and a scientific eye for detail. And, "perhaps by tuning in to the news bulletins issued by some of the planet's smallest reporters" we can all have a better sense of how things are going for the whole. --Paul Hughes

From Publishers Weekly
Despite its ubiquity, dust is not a popular subject among scientists, and lay people tend to brush it off. But Holmes, a science and natural history writer for the Discovery Channel Online, teases many tantalizing facts from this particulate microscopic substance. "[P]olar researchers are drinking water that fell as snow during the crusades," for instance. "Hundreds of years' worth of dust has piled up on the well floor," most of it "space dust," as "only a small amount of windblown Earth dusts" reach Antarctica. Some readers may be turned off or sent on a wild cleaning frenzy by much of the information: "you breathe about 700,000 of your own skin flakes each day," for instance, or "a cup of flour... isn't legally filthy until it contains about 150 insect fragments and a couple of rodent hairs." And some of her more harrowing facts might inspire minor lifestyle changes: household dust is comprised of all manner of toxic materials, like "widely produced" chromium and mercury metals, pesticides, and herbicides, and "the average child eats 15 or 20 milligrams of dust a day, and superslurpers eat 30 to 50 milligrams." While factoid set-pieces run the show here, Holmes's tours through the science behind them are lucid. Allergy sufferers and other interested parties will relish this book; others may prefer to remain blissfully ignorant of their particulate surroundings.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Can the ordinary subject of dust lead to discussions on planetary evolution, allergies, lung disease, dinosaurs, and pollution? Holmes, a writer for the Discovery Channel Online and contributor to Outside, Sierra, and other magazines, enthusiastically shows that it can, covering these areas and others in her enjoyable new book. Inspired by a trip to the Gobi Desert, during which she was inundated with dust, Holmes explores how dust has been crucial in the birth of planets, how it affects the earth's environment and weather, and how humans create it as well. Out to communicate straight facts and science, she considers technical points in language that is clear and comprehensible even for those lacking a science background. In addition to the bibliography, Holmes provides a listing of web sites for each chapter so that readers may easily obtain current information and graphics. Who would have known so much can come from so little? Strongly recommended for all popular science collections. Michael D. Cramer, Raleigh, NC
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.