Exploring dust as a method for seeing the world - from space dust to sandstorms, the domestic to the digital.

Combining history and science, a sweeping look at the smallest substance and the biggest challenges facing people and the planet

Four-and-a-half billion years ago, Planet Earth was formed from a vast spinning nebula of cosmic dust, the detritus left over from the birth of the sun. Within the next 100 years, human life on swathes of the Earth's surface will end in a haze of heat, drought, and, again, dust. Dust is a legacy of 20th-century progress and a profound threat to life in the 21st century.

And yet dust is something we hardly ever consider--it is so small and so mundane as to be beyond the threshold of thought.

Jay Owen's Dust sparks curiosity and corrects that oversight. This is a book on humanity, the Earth, and what we've done to it over the last century. It moves from the sunlit orange groves of a thirsty Los Angeles at the birth of the "automotive city," to Oklahoma and its Dust Bowl migrants. Owens takes listeners to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab where spacecraft are built in "clean rooms" and to the Aral Sea, Chernobyl, and the Greenland Ice Sheet, to help us better understand our legacy and the challenges we face in the years ahead.

This is a smart, beautifully crafted book that builds big ideas from the smallest particles.