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Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, by Joseph A. Amato
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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
- Sales Rank: #363776 in Books
- Published on: 2001-11-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .75" w x 5.50" l, .73 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 262 pages
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.
From Kirkus Reviews
Never favored with a great press (except when made of gold or spices), dust finally gets the full social, scientific, and historical treatment. Cultural historian Amato (Southwest State Univ., Minnesota) chooses what lies at the limits of visibility to the naked eye as a cultural turning point. Before Leeuwenhoek, humans accepted dust as the ultimate smallness, an inevitable, sometimes potent, and often inimical presence. Noting distinctions between airborne dust and earthy, excremental dirt, Amato provides memorable descriptions of just how much of both formed the environment of the average medieval peasant, king, or queen. Meanwhile, scholars pondered what lay beyond the visible and speculated on the ultimate constituents of matter, be they Democritus' atoms or the four humors. With the microscope came revelations of a hitherto invisible world. But it was not until the industrial revolution that society began ``the great cleanup'' and medicine discovered the germ theory of disease. Herein lies a paradox dear to Amato: The very inventions that brought light, heat, running water, and sanitation to society created new miasmas and particulate matter to darken and poison the earth. Today we live suspended between an ever-enlarging macrocosm and physicists increasing focus on the smallest of the small. Yet we still fear viruses and prions, toxic waste and radioactive fallout. This fear has inspired an ecological quasi-religion Amato treats with some contempt, observing that believers have redefined contamination and pollution as inorganic, synthetic, and artificial, forgetting that nature is not intrinsically benign. Despite our enlightenment, Amato finds human beings still ``mired'' in bodies and belief systems that defy the new microcosmic reality in favor of myths and magic and the belief in ourselves as the measure of all things. Readers may not agree with Amato's pessimism, but there's no denying he has forcefully underscored just how much humankind has both suffered and feared, celebrated and revered, the visible world of dust. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
The downfall of dust
By Harry Eagar
Dust has had a mixed status, from the worthless dust we shook from our sandals as we left town to gold dust and pixie dust. Until the 19th century it was surprisingly important. It was the limit of the small.
And, writes cultural historian Joseph Amato, in the old days "in times before industry . . . men and women were intimate with dust in ways beyond contemporary imagination."
Amato is also an intellectual historian, and while wearing that hat he points out that "a grain of house dust is roughly halfway in size between a subatomic particle and the planet Earth."
Clearly, there is more to dust than just . . . particles.
For a long time, according to "Dust." dust was the smallest thing humans knew of and something they could not control, no matter how much damage it caused to life and health.
Peasants inevitably wallowed in dust, and its less reputable cousin dirt, but the aristocrats were nearly as dusty. Since it was, by present standards, dark most of the time, dust could hide.
The early modern period began the downfall of dust. First, microscopes discovered things smaller than dust. By the 19th century improved lighting gave dust fewer places to hide. Also by the 19th century, chemistry and materials science gave people (read: housewives) the tools to eliminate dust.
Dust was pursued relentlessly, in the home; outside by paving roads and turning yards into lawns; by providing vast amounts of pure water to wash dust away; and by burying garbage in dumps.
With the coming of washing soda, people were able to wear bright, colorful clothes, and a dye industry arose to provide them. As time went on, our surroundings were redesigned of novel materials that were unfriendly to dust, like glass, linoleum, galvanized metal.
Not everybody was pleased. The Crystal Palace, which was built of glass in London in 1851 to celebrate the modern age., was a wonder of the world -- but also a target of grubby rockthrowers.
The friends of dust were on the losing side. "Civilization depends on control of the small," writes Amato, and by 1899 the subatomic age had begun.
"In the 20th century, smallness and dust have diverged."
Dust attempted a comeback with environmentalists, whose quest for the "natural" necessarily kicked up a lot of dust. Amato's book is a history, not a polemic, but he makes it clear he thinks that returning to the Reign of Dust, with its disease, death and squalor, is nuts.
But while "Dust" is not a polemic, it is not exactly a "history," either. Footnotes are as likely to refer to a Time cover as to a study of industrial dusts. The book is more of a long, thoughtful essay than a monograph.
Though dust has, in one sense, been vanquished for good, in another Amato predicts it will always remain a benchmark.
Philosophers have speculated that our recent knowledge of the very small (and the very big) will change the way we imagine. Perhaps, says Amato, but probably not. "We shape our images to fit our body size, feelings, interests and moral and dramatic purposes," he writes.
"Nothing is too great or too tiny for human prayer or poetry."
UPDATE: Since Amato published "Dust" in 2000. researchers have become increasingly convinced that dust is an important nutrient that supports food chains starting with plankton in the ocean. In Hawaii, they have concluded that dust blown from Mongolia is the only thing that keeps the very rainy island of Kauai green; without an annual recharge of dust, all the nutrients of Kauai's soil would be washed away and the green island would be brown.
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Who Will Tremble at These Marvels?
By Mark K. Jensen
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.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Ashes to Ashes, Kudos to Dust
By Craig Curtis
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!
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