Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible.(Review)

Dust, A History of the Small and Invisible. By Joseph A. Amato (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000) 250 pp. $22.50

I finished reading Amato's well-crafted history of small and invisible particles while sitting in my alergist's office, awaiting my monthly injections. It seemed appropriate. After all, was I not there to acquire immunity against dust, pollen molds, and other microscopic irritants that make my eyes itch, my nose run, and my head ache? Amato is right, I thought. The small can wield disproportionate power over our lives, sometimes for better, but often for worse.

Amato offers a sparkling synthetic study--even a "poetic meditation," as the book jacket boasts--about humanity's changing relationship to the small, especially to dust, once "the finest thing the human eye could see" and, therefore, "the first and most common measure of smallness" (3). Prior to embarking on a chronological exploration of humankind's shifting perception of dust as reality and metaphor, the author observes that a history of dust must engage three paradoxes. One paradox is that industrialization, which generated so much dust and in such variety, also offered society the capacity to regulate dust with greater precision than in any earlier era. Second, even as society was learning the necessity of cleaning up dust, removing it from sight and the body, human discoverers in several fields of specialization were discovering entities--some living and some inert--even smaller than dust. Finally, despite the identification and mastery of much of the world that exists on a microscope slide, human being s are still fearful that their progress and abundance can be threatened, even undermined, by things only visible with powerful electron microscopes, and perhaps not even then. With the skill of a craftsman at the loom, Amato weaves these paradoxes into his text's fabric.

Amato begins with medieval European peasantry because, as ...