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Rating: 
Summary: From dust
Review: A great read begins with a thought, no matter how seemingly insignificant, from a great mind. The hallmark of great writing is when the author is unbound by some repetively obsessed over interest and has the imagination and confidence to write about a new and unfamiliar topic. Hannah Holmes has shown me that she can probably write about any topic she chooses and make it interesting and entertaining. If a subject seems uninteresting, it is because there is not enough information. This book has enough information, salted with Hannahs gift as a storyteller to make this book as hard to put down as a ruptured tube of superglue.
Rating:
Summary: The little things mean so much
Review: Dust. It's all around us in our daily lives. We brush it off the tabletop and sweep it with the broom. Holmes shows us that it's a lot more than that. It's the building blocks of the universe. It's a natural part of our lives - we each have our own individual dust clouds. Unlike Peanut's Pigpen, ours is usually not visible. Hannah Holmes has written a broad and surprisingly accessible book looking at the roles and dangers that dust plays in our lives. She is able to easily slide from the macro view of the universe to the micro view of dust mites without losing her audience. Dust rises from the most unexpected places - who would have though of the sea as a dust creator, yet spray allows the launching of salt particles into the air at a surprising rate. And penguins produce ammonia gas that condenses into small balls. Holmes writes, "By accidentally flying through penguin-poo dust in the making, Hubert and friends had caught the magical transition of gas to particle." You will walk away from this book hopefully not fearing, but respecting dust for its role in our, and the planet's life. Holmes shows us that even the little mundane subjects of day to day life, can have profound effects upon us all.
Rating: 
Summary: On the edge of greatness
Review: I first heard of the author, Hannah Holmes, as she was giving a radio interview on NPR. Unfortunately, reading the book is just like listening to the author on the radio -- she uses beautiful descriptive language, but there are NO pictures, even though she often verbally describes pictures of the wonderful world of dust she's seen.
The prose is beautiful, and the coverage of the book is extensive. Her jump to the view that the Earth will be swallowed up by the sun in the distant future is less likely scientifically than she makes it appear. And the book tends a bit too much to simplicity instead of thoroughness.
But why would photos, or drawings at least, be left out of a book which could benefit so much from them? The microscopic world of dust, and the cosmic scale of stardust and global dust flows, is not easily and accurately imagined. This lack brings the potential rating of the book (4 or 5 stars) down to 2 stars. Only _after_ the reader goes through over 200 pages of bare text does the reader get to the list of about sixty websites in an appendix at the back of the book -- websites which contain pictures of what she's been talking about. But, these sites are not grouped on the web, and must be accessed individually by typing in the lengthy URL's -- assuming you still have the interest to go back to see the actual images you were only "picturing" in your mind, AND you have internet access at your reading spot and the time to type in each URL individually. The book's listing of the first URL I explored had a typo in it, and it took some exploring to find the typo (.html is listed, but the site uses .htm). How much trouble would it have been to bring all these sites together on an author or book website, so that the reader could click from one to the other? Couldn't this appendix of websites been mentioned in the introduction or first chapter -- where the reader would be warned to refer to it periodically -- since the website list is apparently a substitute for photos or drawings in the book?
This is a book on the edge of greatness. Hopefully in future editions of this book, and certainly in Ms. Holmes' future books, relevant photographs and drawings will be included. Just as Ms. Holmes didn't do her research over the telephone, she should not expect us to grasp the full beauty and understanding of what she describes through mere words.
Rating:
Summary: write a book about dust? apperently so
Review: Most things we run across in life - books, movies, art - are simply variations of each other. This book is something truly unique unto itself, breaking new ground and propelling the reader into strange new worlds of thought, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, from the omnipresent to the unnoticeable. You haven't read anything like it. Stretching the mind to conceive things that it has never even occurred to us to consider, it leads us on a strange and wondrous journey through time and space, through events cataclysmic and mundane. Better buy two copies, because friends who stop by will suddenly find themselves "borrowing" it, only to have it "borrowed" away in turn by others. In that way, this book is a bit incendiary in nature as it has a power to ignite the curiosity of anyone who comes into contact with it. Catch the flame.
Rating:
Summary: write a book about dust? apperently so
Review: Science writer Holmes will have readers looking at dust in a new light as they vacuum their rugs. Born in a supernova, a huge cloud of space dust was the origin of the solar system and of us. More than 100 tons of space dust rains down on Earth daily, but it is planet-formed dust that is the theme of this well-written book. Holmes writes of the great desert dust storms (the Sahara yearly puts 600 million tons into the atmosphere) that disperse around the globe. Humans breathe in more than a billion and a half dust particles daily from "clean air." Holmes describes the health effects of all this dust, but that of household dust is the most striking. Poorly vacuumed rugs may contain up to three and a half cups of dust per square meter, containing, among other things, 18,000 dust mites per teaspoon of dust and creating an asthma epidemic in the US where the number of sufferers have increased 150 percent since 1970. Holmes cites the "hygiene hypothesis" as a partial explanation--the obsession to keep houses and children spotless may have lowered resistance to allergens found in household dust. An entertaining and informative book; chapter list of Web sites; extensive bibliography
Rating: 
Summary: Too Diverse
Review: The author explores the role and impact of dust-sized particles in settings as diverse as galaxies and your own home. Unfortunaely this very diversity keeps the book from hanging together very well. The chapters, severely truncated, would have done better as individual magazine articles.
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Summary: Tedious, Overly-Amazed by Well-Known/Boring Facts
Review: This book is packed with a lot of facts - too many facts, and no central theme to thread them all together. And the dull prose - more or less in the style of a mother explaining things to a not-so-bright child - adds no narrative or entertainment value. The dustcover promises an entertaining read, but all we get is a tedious recitation of widely-known or terminally boring facts, all of them presented in the tone of one recommending them for inclusion in Ripley's Believe It Or Not. Yawn.
Rating: 
Summary: Often fascinating, sometimes dull.
Review: Writing is excellent, although occasionally a certain "breathlessness" in tone becomes wearying. There are a number of unresolved scientific questions, such as the cause of asthma, and Holmes does a particularly good job with these. The material on dust and weather is fascinating. While Holmes' sympathies are clear, she remains objective. Despite Holmes' best efforts, however, the underlying material is not uniformly interesting. For example, there are some interesting and surprising causes of dust, and causes of ill health, but Holmes' comprehensive treatment also, necessarily, touches on the well known, amplifying with statistics and so on that just aren't that interesting.
Rating:
Summary: Often fascinating, sometimes dull.
Review: Writing is excellent, although occasionally a certain "breathlessness" in tone becomes wearying. There are a number of unresolved scientific questions, such as the cause of asthma, and Holmes does a particularly good job with these. The material on dust and weather is fascinating. While Holmes' sympathies are clear, she remains objective. Despite Holmes' best efforts, however, the underlying material is not uniformly interesting. For example, there are some interesting and surprising causes of dust, and causes of ill health, but Holmes' comprehensive treatment also, necessarily, touches on the well known, amplifying with statistics and so on that just aren't that interesting.
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