Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible [Hardcover]

Joseph A. Amato (Author), Abigail Rorer (Illustrator), Jeffrey Burton Russell (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0520218752 | ISBN-13: 978-0520218758 | Edition: 1

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.
Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Until this century, dust and dirt - motes, mites, flea parts, skin flecks, pollen, garden dirt - were the smallest things most people thought about. They seemed omnipresent and ineradicable. Now we vacuum our kitchens, take showers, study quarks and give most dust the brush-off. Speaking up for the little things, Amato (The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus), professor of intellectual and cultural history at Minnesota's Southwest State University, offers a book-length meditation on the importance and symbolism of particulate matter in Europe and America. Anthropologist Mary Douglas; medieval historians like Lucien Febvre and Carlo Ginzburg; Renaissance sculptors, glassblowers and alchemists; microscope pioneers Leeuwenhoek and Hooke; and Dolly the cloned sheep all figure in Amato's speedy cultural history. Medieval French folk frequently deloused each other and called their thumbs "louse-killers." Early Victorian urbanization brought Britain filthy slums, along with reformers who tried to clean them up: later on, lightbulbs banished indoor soot. The Dust Bowl years of 1932-1938 darkened the skies of the American Midwest and caused more than half its residents to move away. Amato aims at a broad literary readership, not at historians of science; his synthetic, essayistic bent can make for glib and predictable generalizations ("Until the Industrial Revolution, humanity accepted the cyclical nature of life"). In our century, Amato writes, "smallness and dust have diverged"; by now dust is neither our metaphor for littleness, nor our constant companion. Instead "contemporary people are married to a new microcosm" consisting of things (like viruses) too small to see. Readers who find such a thesis small potatoes may still find themselves enticed by Amato's accounts of the minuscule. 30 line illus. by Abigail Rorer. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

To call something "dry as dust" is to suggest that it is dull and insignificant. Thus, one might wonder why anybody would write a book about dust. Amato (The Decline of Rural Minnesota), a cultural historian, gives it a noble effort, but, in doing so, stretches his resources. It's not that dust is entirely devoid of interestAit has had a profound effect on human health and hygiene, and you might say that the ultimate fate of the universe depends on how much dust resides unseen in the cosmos. Still, because the topic itself is hardly riveting, Amato places it within the broader context of the history of human understanding of the microcosmos. That's a much bigger subject than the title suggests, and it deserves a more comprehensive treatment than this book attempts. An optional purchase.AGregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib., Coral Gables, FL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 262 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (January 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520218752
• ISBN-13: 978-0520218758
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,558,307 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ashes to Ashes, Kudos to Dust, April 6, 2000

By 

Craig Curtis (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (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:

5.0 out of 5 stars Let's Get Small!, March 29, 2000

By 

Craig Curtis (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (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:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strange and fascinating book, October 25, 2000

By 

Carl Kay (Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible (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.