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Title: Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible by Joseph A. Amato, Abigail Rorer ISBN: 0-520-21875-2 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 17 January, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)

Rating: 1
Summary: Deceptive Title - "Dust" Will Leave You Sneezing & Wheezing
Comment: Warning - This book has very little to do with dust! Actually, with his book Dust - A History Of The Small & The Invisible Joseph Amato demonstrates an inability to focus on any one topic for more than a paragraph at a time and obfuscates what otherwise should have been a rich and interesting topic below a morass of historical anecdotes. I was thoroughly disappointed. Effective historians have a natural ability to absorb volumes of information, select those facts and events which are important, and weave them into a coherent, interesting narrative. While Mr. Amato's 41 pages of supporting notes and 15 page bibliography suggest that comprehensive research was performed on the topic, no amount of references or notes can make up for his failure to focus on important aspects of "Dust's" history and inability to create from them an interesting story. If you are looking for a rewarding, enlightening read, look elsewhere.

Rating: 4
Summary: Who Will Tremble at These Marvels?
Comment: This bright and sprightly stroll through the human relationship with the minute comes to a surprisingly dark conclusion.

Joseph Amato, Professor of Intellectual and Cultural History at a small college in southwestern Minnesota, tells an interesting, if familiar, tale. Dust was long defined by its occupation of the lowest position on the scale of the visible ('pollen' is the Latin word for 'dust'), and it symbolized insignificance and near-nothingness. Then came Western - now global - science. Dust became a multiform heap of material objects within a certain range of sizes ("With so much known about the invisible, dust can never again be ordinary," he writes), while at the same time ever more powerful instruments pushed ever further toward zero the notion of the infinitesimal. Meanwhile, civil authorities find themselves in a constant scramble to adapt to science's new insights into the implications for human well-being.

Prof. Amato is at his best in his survey of these societal responses to the news from the microcosm, and has interesting and upbeat things to say about the history of health, housekeeping, and hygiene. (He is much weaker on the scientific and intellectual side of things. I found particularly regrettable his neglect of Lovejoy's classic *The Great Chain of Being* - a work he cites in the notes but shows no sign of having assimilated.)

But the reader who arrives at the end of this brief volume is likely to be surprised at the author's take on the prospects of our increasing mastery of what is minute affecting our imaginative lives. In an essay written in the early twenties entitled "Subject-Matter of Poetry," Aldous Huxley expressed amazement that "The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of the old. The boundaries have not been extended. There would be real novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions. It has not." The concluding chapter of *Dust*, entitled "Who Will Tremble at These Marvels?" attempts to explain why not, and in doing so takes into a minor key what had till then seemed to be a work written in a major mode. This chapter, together with the touching ten-page memoir of his mother's relation to dust presented in an appendix, are the best things in the book.

Rating: 5
Summary: A strange and fascinating book
Comment: 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.

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