This book is fascinating! I’ve never before thought about how many living things live in a space is especially one that you call home and this book really brought that to light and open my mind so much. This is a fantastic nonfiction read, it is packed with information, and the writing style is very easy to read and almost conversational. I highly recommend this book if you’re into non-fiction or you just want to have your mind blown.

A fabulous addition to anyone's collection that is a fan of natural history, gardening, naturism etc

This is one of my favorite books that I've read in years, which is really surprising as it's about all the bugs, bacteria and creepy crawlies that we live with in our homes. It's an utterly fascinating book not just about all the life that lives around us, but how vitally important most of it is to our health -- how we're screwing up our immune systems and creating problems by trying to kill everything.

Dunn is a passionate scientist and the kind of writer who pulls you into his enthusiasm and wonder. The book is filled with fascinating history, scientific studies and stories that will change the way you look at your water, your pets, even your sourdough bread. I found myself highlighting so much to share with others.

My favorite books are the ones where I end up telling my husband, friends and older kids all about them again and again in the kitchen, in the car, while chatting at the park and at the dinner table. This is one of those books. Well written and intensely interesting, it also has some pretty important messages that everyone needs to hear. Highly recommended.

I read a digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

Never Home Alone by Rob Dunn takes a look at the microbes, bugs, and other organisms that inhabit our homes alongside us. The author made this topic thoroughly entertaining and educational at the same time. The thought of bugs and fungi inside my home should have made my skin crawl. Instead it made me want to start searching the windowsills and corners to identify the things living in my home. I am sure I drove my husband a bit crazy with my constant "did you know...." while reading. This is one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read.

Good, informative book, with a very nice cover too, on a pressing issue of our times.

Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

I learned so much from this book and enjoyed the new perspective that it gave me about the tiny organisms living around me in my home. The only drawback is it was a bit long-winded and sometimes went into unnecessary detail.

This is one of the only times I will rate the book higher on the review than I would personally give it. That is to say it is a good, interesting book that covers aspects of science and life others don't consider. For me, it was actually too basic and all those paragraphs spent on describing how PCR works, for example, were boring - but that's because it's old knowledge for me. For someone else? It's very, very accessible and easy to read if you don't have a science background. So for that, it earns an extra star, but for me, I suppose I wanted more science and less lecture I've heard before.

Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live is a mouthful of a title. Which is only appropriate as abundance is one of the major themes Rob Dunn highlights in this utterly fascinating book. The rich, fecund abundance of life not of the world “out there”(though that too) but the world “in here,” where we live — our homes. How rich and fecund? How about 80, 000 species of bacteria and archaea, tens of thousands of fungi species, and thousands of species of arthropods, along with a number of rodents. All found in a biological survey of a thousand Raleigh homes. And those are our uninvited guests. Dunn doesn’t ignore the ones we bring in willingly — our dogs and cats (who themselves bring in a host of hitchhikers). If our homes are our castles, they’ve been overrun.

But before you get too cringy about the whole idea, or decide to run out to the nearest hardware store for some traps and cans of Raid, Dunn’s message isn’t simply that we share our homes with a whole lotta creatures, but that this is a good thing. It’s their absence that we should fear, not their presence. And for as enthusiastic as he waxes about all that life in our basements, our drains, our showerheads, our bed linens, he’s equally depressed and disturbed over the disappearing biodiversity of our world — the little ones we inhabit all by ourselves or with our families as well as the single big one all of us share as one human race. Never Home Alone is both a joyful lilt and a dirge (or at least a warning cry).

Dunn opens with the statistic that the typical American child now spends “93% of his or her time in a building or vehicle,” a percentage not much removed from children in other parts of the developed world. We have become, in his words, “Homo Indoorus, the “indoor ape.” About time, he argues then, that we pay attention to what else is indoors with us.

After a brief jump back in time to show us the early discovery of bacteria/protists, focusing especially on Leeuwenhoek and Hooke of the 17th Century, Dunn starts us off in one of the more mundane routines of modern daily life, the shower. More precisely, the showerhead, which he and other scientists have found is home to an abundant ecosystem of mycobacteria, biofilms that include “predatory bacteria swimming . . . like pikes through water . . . protists that eat the ‘pikes’ and nematodes that eat the protists, as well as fungi doing their own fungal thing. This is the food web that falls upon you as you bathe each day . . . trillions of individual organisms” (and you thought you were getting squeaky clean . . . ).

Well, at least, you might think, your water is “treated,” and it’s true that in most of the US water is treated with chlorine (or a similar agent), but in the sort of unintended consequence that Dunn returns to again and again, our destroying all the bacteria in treated water means we create the perfect environment for problematic ones to evolve and survive, which is why Dunn was able for instance, to predict mycobacterial infections based on knowing if the water was municipal (treated) or well water (untreated). As he puts it “our fanciest water treatment technology is creating water systems filled with microbes that are less healthful for humans than those found in untreated aquifers”

Before you dismantle and sterilize your showerhead though, Dunn throws in a twist. It turns out that not all such bacteria are bad (in fact, he highlights only about). One types, Mycobacterium vaccae appears to diminish stress in mice, so perhaps that relaxing shower is due to not so much from the warm water falling on your face, but the teeming biofilm falling with it (if you’re still worried, Dunn does note only people with immune issues are at any minimal risk, and also that plastic showerheads seems to be more resistant to colonization by biofilms than metal ones).

Somewhat similarly, that lowly cave cricket hiding in our basement turns out to be of potential benefit as well. Its digestive bacteria, which allows it to survive in the nutrient-poor environments of our cellars, also, Dunn has shown via experiment, can break down one of our most toxic industrial waste products: black liquor, a highly alkaline byproduct of paper making that has to be burned because it is too toxic to store safely anywhere. Oh, and that thief ant wandering off with a grain of sugar from your cupboard? Turns out it might also be carrying just the antibiotic we’re looking for. Maybe therefore, given the potential benefits these tiny creatures offer up, we should stop killing them.

This is the twin track of Dunn’s book: a contagiously effusive and enthusiastic sense of wonder of just how much life there is right before our eyes or under our feet that we just don’t notice in our day-to-day lives, and a constant sense of dismay over how we keep making the same mistakes, our indiscriminate chemical assault on that life wiping out not simply both bad and good together (the pests and non-pests, the dangerous and beneficent), but wiping out mostly the good by creating an “enemy-free space” because “resistance is quick to evolve among species we don’t like and less likely to evolve among the rest of life . . . including the natural enemies of the pests we are trying to control.” Put another way: “when you kill species but leave the resources upon which they feed, the tough species not only survive but thrive in the vacuum created by the death of their competition . . . in what ecologists call ‘competitive release.’”

Our obsession with sanitizing everything, wiping out the creeping, crawling and flying creatures we share the world with, and waging antibiotic warfare on every little sniffle has only created a world where we suffer more from allergies and asthma and where pathogens are becoming ever more quickly resistant to even our antibiotics of “last resort.” A less biodiverse world is not only a duller world, but also a less safe one. Vaccinate your kids, wash your hands, drink only clean water, yes. But also open your windows more often, get dirty now and then, and put down the Raid (the number of dangerous pathogens, bacteria, etc. number barrels a hundred out of all the millions).

Never Home Alone is endlessly fascinating and I could discuss so many such examples that this review would be nearly as long as the book (I highlighted a huge amount of lines). This is a book, after all, that encompasses German cockroaches and home baked bread, social spiders and Korean kimchee. Beyond the captivating details, it is as well always engaging, filled with sparkling wonder and scientific curiosity as it glides smoothly back and forth across time to provide historical context, and is utterly convincing and compelling in its heartfelt call to return biodiversity to our lives and the world. Highly recommended.

I'm rating this highly for sheer quantity of content and number of researchers. Be aware though, that the book doesn't so much discuss household pests as microscopic life. Mice - yes, but mainly to analyse their parasites and likelihood of being eaten by cats. In an astounding correlation, the blood of people who took more risks, was found to have more likelihood of antibodies to the parasite that causes mouse brains to become hyperactive and not afraid of cats.

To get there, we have come through a Dutch early scientist Leeuwenhoek who made his own glass microscopes and tubes to study pepper grains in water; he explored living bacteria and protists. By way of John Snow and London's cholera, through the alleyways of tuberculosis and the slime inside shower heads. Eventually we turn up cockroaches and find that sweet baits caused a variant with a dislike for sweet tastes to evolve into the resident strain very fast, independently, in many homes. How do we know this? An unfortunate researcher spent three years... I'll let you read that for yourself. The range of scientists is astounding as we meet dung beetle experts, ant discoverers, fungi fans, termite troublers, house cleaning fanatics, prehistoric human specialists and more.

The theme boils down to the fact that the more we clean our indoor environments, the more we impoverish our outdoor environments from biodiverse farm and wood, the more diseases and auto-immune conditions we risk. We need biodiversity in the microbiome. The accounts of studies comparing Amish and Hutterite children, Finnish forest cabins and Helsinki apartments, come relatively early and we spend the rest of the book absorbing reinforcements. When I was growing up it was already well known that girls with brothers, and kids with dogs, were healthier because they had broader immune systems than those without.

This book won't be for everyone but it's readable, wry and packed. The references are on P263 - 307 in my ARC. As everyone is listed by first initial instead of name I was unable to count how many women were credited; but women researchers feature largely through the pages. Several photos, graphs and other illustrations are very helpful.
I downloaded this e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

This book is perfect for anyone high school age on up who have an interest in weird biology. Everything from Toxoplasma gondii which we already all try to ignore to the many, many little critters that we can't see and I'm all skeeved out by now. The microbes that live in hot water heaters and shower heads are particularly worrisome to me. I also enjoyed the chapter on the International Space Station. It is so exciting how most of the microbes caught a ride up there in the astronauts gut. You know, in a weird geeky way.

I'm planning on including parts of this book when my kid gets to high school Biology.

My thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

A very good book of popular science. It's interesting, informative, and entertaining.
It can be a bit creepy to read what is living in our homes but also a good way to learn about the world around us.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to Perseus Books and Netgalley for this ARC

We often think that nothing is going on in our house but this book Never Home Alone focuses on all the tiny living creatures living in the house just like you. I like how this nonfiction book explores and explains everything about small creatures such as fungi, microbes... It was an interesting reading!

This book was very interesting and informative but also disturbing. I must admit that I had trouble sleeping after reading this book and it made me want to clean my house. Ha ha

I bet you didn't know you have hundreds and possibly thousands of...um...bugs living in your home. Good thing having such diversity in your living quarters is actually good for you! Apparently, the more we try to kill, sweep away, clean, and poison all those critters, the more of a disservice we do ourselves. I, for one, am more than happy to jump on the bandwagon and leave more germs, bugs, and dust in my home. Hey, I do anyway, and it's great for your immune system to expose yourself to dirt and critters. Problem solved!

I love science, probably more than most, but found much of the experimental data to drone on a bit too much. Why was there such concentration on the camel cricket? Does the reader really need to know that much about a cricket? Good thing there was a great deal of info on the German cockroach, and I was pleased to learn that they're not quite as filthy as we've been taught. And, studies show they even get lonely. Who knew? So be a little kinder to them, won't you? I know I will from now on. Perhaps I will speak gently to them before my husband does them in. Or grant them a final meal, at least.

Anyone who cooks will be fascinated to learn of the varying tastes the resident bacteria on our hands adds to the food we prepare. It may really be true that food really DOES taste better when someone else makes it.

A bit too "sciencey" in places, but the subject matter overall and the author's sense of humor make for an enlightening read.

A nonfiction book about the various things that live in human houses, from bacteria and fungi on up. You would assume – certainly I assumed – that we already know what lives in our houses; that surely the creatures we come into contact with every day have been thoroughly studied. Dunn points out that, actually, every scientist has assumed the same thing since shortly after the invention of the microscope, and thus we know less about our daily companions than we do about what's hiding in the leaf litter of rainforest in Costa Rica. As an example, just a few years ago a new species of frog was discovered living in NYC – and if you know anything about biology, you know how rare it is for new vertebrate species to be discovered, much less new species in one of the most densely populated areas in the USA.

Dunn is himself a scientist who has been working to correct this, by studying human homes as a type of important and widespread habitat. He's led or participated in projects looking at topics as varied as microbes adapted to live in hot water heaters, the biofilm of bacteria in shower heads (yup, sorry, every time you shower you're dosing yourself with bacteria, though possibly some of them have a serotonin-boosting effect), camel crickets in basements and the bacteria in their guts, black mold in drywall, cockroach evolution (did you know German cockroaches – the main species who bother humans – no longer have any wild populations, anywhere in the world, but only live in human habitations?), bacteria in babies' noses, and the various fungi and microbes infesting the International Space Station, mostly carried there on astronauts' skin or in their guts.

But if you're feeling the urge to immediately douse yourself in bleach, don't. Dunn repeatedly makes the point that the vast majority of biodiversity around us is harmless, and cleaning it away may be doing us more damage than leaving it alone. Whether it's an uptick in rates of allergies and asthma as children are no longer exposed to potential triggers, or that the lack of predators and competitors gives the few actually dangerous pathogens (such as those cockroaches, not to mention antibiotic-resistant Staph) an advantage, all those gross-sounding but innocuous microbes around us are playing an important role.

It's not a perfect book; I particularly was disappointed that Dunn spends a whole chapter on Toxoplasma gondii (the parasite that spreads through cat feces and triggers risky behavior in rats and mice, making them more likely to be eaten), since I think anyone with an interest in 'weird biology' is probably already very familiar with it. But despite that, I really enjoyed Never Home Alone, and would highly recommend to any other weird biology fans.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2478742215

Never Home Alone explores the variety of life that shares our living spaces with us, from microbes and fungi, to insects and other arthropods; as well as the ways in which those lifeforms are evolving. This is a well written, popular science book that shows us that the ecosystems in our homes are more diverse than we may suspect, and that most of our co-inhabitants are beneficial or benign as opposed to harmful. The author’s enthusiasm for this subject is evident as he tells readers about various interesting studies about the creatures living with us.

The author discusses such things as swabbing the International Space station (ISS) for bacteria and fungi; chronic autoimmune diseases associated with lack of microbes; microbes living in water heaters, showerheads, tap water, dry-walling; technophilic fungi that eat metal and plastics; the “uses” that our co-inhabitants may provide in terms of health and industrial applications; the evolution of pesticide resistance and the use of social spiders as non-toxic fly catchers; pets and the additional creatures they bring indoors; fermented food and bread making (Herman the yeast starter makes an appearance here); and the inoculation of beneficial microbes to prevent colonization by harmful microbes.

I found the sections that deal with microbes and fungi on the Space Stations (ISS and Mir) to be especially interesting. Dunn points out that these fungi are more successful in establishing themselves in space in terms of procreation and living out many generations, that humans have been.

I really would have loved more scientific details, but that’s just my preference. I found this book to be interesting and informative, with a chatty and informal writing style. Human houses provide living spaces and ecosystems for a myriad of organisms. After reading this book, you will never look at your home in the same way again.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC.

Long time ago there was a book called the "Secret House" which talked about the mites living in your eyelashes. I used that book to gross out my biology students and it gave them the creeps.

Never Home Alone is the advanced version of this. Not only did I immediately change out my shower head to rid myself of imaginary or real biofilm, but I also worried about the idea that pretty much all drywall has fungus in it when it is manufactured that it releases when it gets wet. Let's not even talk about the diatomaceous earth I dusted the basement with to get rid of any crawlers.

Not for the squeamish, this is fun popular science investigating the living world in our domestic space--the bacteria that live in water heaters and shower heads, the skin mites we leave on pillowcases (and on the International Space Station), millipedes in the crawlspace and mealworms in your pantry jars, as well as the turns these creatures take when we try to sterilize the counters or fumigate them out of the house.