The Nature of Things

The full title of this book is quite a mouthful: Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live. That's a tall order that the title promises to fulfill but Rob Dunn manages to do it. The aim of his book is to explore the biosphere that comprises all the critters that live on and in our bodies and that share our houses with us. After years of sampling and cataloging this biosphere, he and his colleagues found what he describes as a "floating, leaping, crawling circus of thousands of species," perhaps as many as 200,000 altogether. Many of their discoveries were previously unknown to science. Dunn and his team sampled and analyzed such areas around the house as shower heads, door frames, refrigerators, hot water heaters, cellars, toilets, pillowcases, and the list goes on and on. Some of the findings are rather disgusting and occasionally alarming but always fascinating. The bottom-line finding of their res...