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 readers 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 written book that builds big ideas from the smallest particles.