The Secret Life of Dust
From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Hannah Holmes A mesmerizing expedition around our dusty world
Some see dust as dull and useless stuff. But in the hands of author Hannah Holmes, it becomes a dazzling and mysterious force; Dust, we discover, built the planet we walk upon. And it tinkers with the weather and spices the air we breathe. Billions of tons of it rise annually into the air--the dust of deserts and forgotten kings mixing with volcanic ash, sea salt, leaf fragments, scales from butterfly wings, shreds of T-shirts, and fireplace soot. Eventually, though, all this dust must settle.
The story of restless dust begins among exploding stars, then treks through the dinosaur beds of the Gobi Desert, drills into Antarctic glaciers, filters living dusts from the wind, and probes the dark underbelly of the living-room couch. Along the way, Holmes introduces a delightful cast of characters--the scientists who study dust. Some investigate its dark side: how it killed off dinosaurs and how its industrial descendents are killing us today. Others sample the shower of Saharan dust that nourishes Caribbean jungles, or venture into the microscopic jungle of the bedroom carpet. Like The Secret Life of Dust, however, all of them unveil the mayhem and magic wrought by little things.
Hannah Holmes (Portland, ME) is a science and natural history writer for the Discovery Channel Online. Her freelance work has been widely published, appearing in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, National Geographic Traveler, and Escape. Her broadcast work has been featured on Living on Earth and the Discovery Channel Online's Science Live.
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. "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.
