Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible

  • Joseph A. Amato
University of California Press: 2000. 288 pp. $22.50, £13.95

According to some religions, the human race was created from a handful of dust. According to others, perhaps more plausible, that's how we'll all end up. So the subject of dust should be of some interest to all of us, even if we are not cleaners, librarians, vacuum-cleaner sellers or members of Alfred Doolittle's fraternity of dustmen in the film My Fair Lady.

I was glad to have this book sent to me to review, since dust has accompanied me throughout my life. As a child in London I used to watch golden motes of cotton dust spinning slowly as they fell through all-too-infrequent sunbeams. I survived many dusty weeks in San José, Costa Rica, when Volcan Irazu erupted. Every time the wind blew in the wrong direction, it shed so much ash over the city that lawns became grey, and dust-covered coffee plants died for lack of adequate photosynthesis.

I expected to find plenty of scientific information on abundances, sizes, velocities and compositions of interstellar particles, including even little diamonds; of the rates of fall of aerosol particles and their scattering of light in the atmosphere; of redder sunsets on smoggy days; of the aeolian transport of ferruginous dust from the Sahara across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean; of lead dust along roadsides and how it affects traffic policemen and children in areas where automobile fuels are (or were) leaded; of pollen and mites' eggs and allergies; of asbestosis leading to lung cancer; of domestic dust, and how static charges cause it to settle sideways on walls over radiators. Alas, I found almost nothing along these lines.

Amato writes well; he is a littérateur, an elegant stylist and, presumably, a good historian. I learnt about the craze for gold dust, and of rural tragedies in the American dust bowl during the 1930s. Sprinkled unobtrusively through the text are hundreds of little numbers, so small that they don't interrupt one's flow of reading; they refer to original sources quoted in 40 pages near the end of the book, as is perhaps proper for historical theses. (Maybe we scientists could copy this system.)

Clearly, though, Amato is no scientist. What little science we find here is not of the highest order. “A grain of musk perfumes a room for years, and a single grain of indigo colors a ton of water,” he writes. “Antbread is a barely visible part of a tiny seed that ants drag to their nests and which, if uneaten, springs up into plants. … In grain elevators … a single spark from any source (even the tiny amount of electricity given off by the human body) can trigger an immense explosion.” And so on. Amato has spread his net widely. His concept of dust seems to embrace not only the fluff that I surreptitiously sweep under rugs but also sawdust, powdered herbs, flour, gunpowder, dirt, mud, germs of all sorts, worms, lice, and even halitosis! His topics include a scattershot on cancer, Dolly the ewe, Nazism, plumbing, poverty, transistors, Vincent van Gogh … but wait! Underneath all these dusty matters there is, in fact, yet another interesting and informative history of art, culture — yes, even science — in Western Europe during the past millennium.

I am reminded of a game we played in our school debating society. We put into a hat many bits of paper bearing different words as topics, such as God, Macbeth, underpants, UFOs, dust, and so on. Then one of us drew out a couple at random, was allowed two minutes to consider them, and then three minutes to give a short talk somehow integrating the two selected topics. Amato, if he ever played it, would have excelled.

I'm sure many lay readers will find this book entertaining. The University of California Press must have thought so, too.