The Secret Life of Dust

I’ve had the book, The Secret Life of Dust, listed in my “Now Reading” section for the past six months or more.  I don’t know if anyone noticed it there, but if you did, you probably figured I hadn’t started it yet, or had forgotten about it.  The truth is, I have been reading it, and it’s just taken me six months to finish it.  Don’t take this as a slam against the book, because the book is incredible.  Instead, consider it a slam against my brain, which just could not digest all the information in the book in large doses.

The Secret Life of Dust will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about every kind of dust.  The dust on your window sills, the dust in raindrops, the dust which makes smog, the dust which kills coal miners, the dust in the solar system, etc.  All the teeny-tiny specks of matter, some practically invisible, which float around in the atmosphere are considered “dust”, and the stuff they do is pretty incredible.  For example, I didn’t know you needed dust to make rain—the water vapor in the sky needs a solid to cling to, and as more droplets cling to a dust speck, it finally becomes heavy enough to rain down.  No dust means no rain.  Did you know that the dust on your bookshelf may contain particles of dinosaurs, blown up from huge sandstorms in central Asia?  Did you know that you should be worried about smog from Beijing, because you could be breathing it in when you’re outside working in your yard?  Did you know there are people in Turkey who still live in caves, and that most of them die of lung cancer because of naturally-occuring silica?  There’s just so much information in this book, I think the best thing I could do was to read it slowly and carefully and really take it all in.  Not that I’m smart enough to understand most of it, but hey, I’ve got a new appreciation for rain.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 10/04 at 05:52 AM

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