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The Secret Life of Dust by Hannah Holmes, John Wiley, $22.95, ISBN
0471377430

WE INHALE it, eat it and walk around in our own personal clouds of it. Dust
is always with us, but in spite of the size and ubiquity of its tiny particles
it’s far from unimportant. It can have world-shaping impact. Take the soils of
Jamaica and Barbados: they began life as sand blown a speck at a time from the
Sahara.

In The Secret Life of Dust science journalist Hannah Holmes dates her
obsession with dust to a visit to the Gobi Desert. It’s an entertaining little
book and her enthusiasm shines through, along with her admiration for the people
who investigate it. Dust researchers have to be meticulous and imaginative as
they try to capture the tiny specks of evidence they spend their lives
analysing. Holmes interviewed dozens of them, and her thumbnail sketches give a
vivid impression of fellow obsessives tramping across deserts and up volcanoes
to collect samples, then teasing the secrets from their minuscule catches.

Dust research is a relatively new field, so there’s plenty of scope for
imaginative PhD topics, from capturing tiny quantities of cosmic dust (using
sticky traps suspended from high-flying planes) to the peculiar composition of
many terrestrial varieties. Holmes’s book gives a non-technical introduction to
this unexpectedly fascinating field. Some of it makes grim reading, though. Dust
destroys as well as builds. Surprisingly, that clean country air we all prize so
much can be as full of tiny killers as the breeze around any industrial
landscape, while the sheer variety of dusts lurking in the home is positively
alarming. After reading The Secret Life of Dust, the fluff in your vacuum
cleaner will never look quite the same again.