"While the story of the big has often been told, the story of the small has not yet even been outlined. With Dust, Joseph A. Amato enthralls the reader with the first history of the small and the invisible. Dust is a poetic meditation on how dust has been experienced and the small has been imagined across the ages. Examining a thousand years of Western civilization - from the naturalism of medieval philosophy, to the artistry of the Renaissance, to the scientific and industrial revolutions, to the modern worlds of nanotechnology and viral diseases - Dust offers a savvy story of the genesis of the microcosm."--BOOK JACKET.