Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live
Rob Dunn
Nature, medicine
Don't read this book if you're squeamish. Really, seriously, don't. It'll make you want to burn your house down and then shower with industrial-grade solvents and then cover yourself with sterilized plastic wrap and you still won't feel safe.
If you are lacking squeams, Never Home Alone is a very good book about . . . well, it's about several things. Most fundamentally, it's a celebration of the microbial ecosystem. Dunn's major point, I think, is that we are deeply mistaken if we think that we can exist--much less thrive--separate from the fungi, bacteria, protists, microscopic crustaceans, etc. etc. etc. that surround us. In the first place, we evolved to live with them. In the second place, they're everywhere. In the third place, heavy-handed attempts to engineer this microenvironment tend to go awry, sometimes spectacularly so--wiping out benign strains of Staphylococcus both weakens the immune response and leaves a gap for virulent strains to fill, for example.
Okay, there's a little bit of drum-beating for these ideas going on. Thankfully, it's comparatively muted. Even more thankfully, it's backed up by sound observation and testable hypotheses, which is not invariably the case.
Dunn writes in a pleasingly non-technical style, so Never Home Alone should be accessible to almost any reader. (He's also restrained in using the vertical pronoun--also not invariably the case, and nice to see.) He even offers readers a number of ways to join in the scientific fun. If you have any interest at all in natural history, you should read this book.
Me, I'm off to change my showerhead.
This book pairs nicely with Ed Yong's I Contain Multitudes. It also overlaps thematically somewhat with Charles C. Mann's superb The Wizard And the Prophet, particularly in its critique of the technocratic approach to environmental problems.
Read it before the holidays and liked it a great deal. The book is an eye-opener about not only what else lives in our homes but how little science knows about it. I'd also compare it a bit to Thor Hanson's _Buzz_, which delights in the small creatures living around us that we utterly ignore.
ReplyDeleteBuzz is more eloquent. Never Home Alone is more scientifically ambitious. Both good books, though.
ReplyDeleteIf I were to pick a nit with your comparison, I'd say that Buzz highlights the marvelous complexity that we take for granted, while Never Home Alone shows us a world that we don't even see in the first place.