Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places [Hardcover]

Bill Streever (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 22, 2009

From avalanches to glaciers, from seals to snowflakes, and from Shackleton's expedition to "The Year Without Summer," Bill Streever journeys through history, myth, geography, and ecology in a year-long search for cold--real, icy, 40-below cold. In July he finds it while taking a dip in a 35-degree Arctic swimming hole; in September while excavating our planet's ancient and not so ancient ice ages; and in October while exploring hibernation habits in animals, from humans to wood frogs to bears.

A scientist whose passion for cold runs red hot, Streever is a wondrous guide: he conjures woolly mammoth carcasses and the ice-age Clovis tribe from melting glaciers, and he evokes blizzards so wild readers may freeze--limb by vicarious limb.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cold weather systems the earth needs to thrive is the subject of Streever's well-documented book, using all of the author's expertise from his field trips to the world's most frigid environments. Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, writes of the frostiest experience: We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, a driving force. Rather than giving the reader a dry, academic lecture on snow, glaciers, wind-chill factors and icebergs, he delivers a poetic, anecdotal narrative complete with polar expeditions, Ice Age mysteries, igloos, permafrost and hailstorms. Two of the most fascinating segments are the arduous task of scientific reconstruction of past climates and the magical navigation of migratory birds to warmer lands. This is a wonderful collection of one man's first-rate observations and commentary about the history and importance of cold to the earth and its occupants. (July)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Cold, filled with obscure facts and fascinating anecdotes, is both entertaining and enlightening, and Streever's crisp, articulate writing style and easy-to-understand scientific explanations yield a compulsively readable book. However, Streever's loosely organized chapters and stream-of-consciousness, bloglike narrative keep him from dwelling for long on any single topic, and the Dallas Morning News took issue with his single-minded focus on the northern hemisphere. Some critics also objected to his views on climate change, but these complaints stemmed from differences of opinion. Streever's breezy, captivating romp through the frozen North reminds readers "that cold shapes continents, wins and loses wars, fuels madmen, inspires Nobel Prize–winning work, challenges us, curses us and blesses us" (Cleveland Plain Dealer).

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (July 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316042919
• ISBN-13: 978-0316042918
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #424,655 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Travel > Polar Regions > Arctic

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Shades of Farley Mowat!, August 9, 2009

By 

Jan Fechhelm (College Station, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places (Hardcover)

Having spent a few short weeks (way, way too short an amount of time!) in the Arctic, reading this book makes me ache to return. I missed so much - I was so clueless! Reading "Cold - Adventures in the World's Frozen Places" was a very unexpected delight! I am not usually a reader of non-fiction, but this book was so interesting and well writen. The language is rich and well developed, the stories are great, the science is fascinating and most importantly, you can easily tell how much the author loves everything cold, but especially Alaska and the far north.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars new generation of eco-criticism, August 5, 2009

By 

Seth Lerer - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places (Hardcover)

This is a beautiful, evocative book about not just the science or experience of cold but the poetics of the chill. Mr. Streever is an accomplished scientist and nature writer, and this book goes beyond his previous publications to embrace the science and the spirit of the outdoors. Throughout the book, he blends technical observation with historical reference, literary allusion, and personal memoir. Writing of this kind moves beyond the generation of John McPhee -- with its precise detachment and patrician elegance -- and it moves beyond, too, the exhortations of Bill McKibben. IF there is a future for eco-criticism, it may lie precisely in the fractured narrative of Streever's Alaska. In many ways, the arc of the book captures what must be the Alaskan experience: a collection of memories and materials, brought in from "outside," and reassembled into public spaces and private imaginations. It may well be that the the book's controlling structure, then, mirrors the midnight-sun pastiche that is this state, and it's good to know that, whatever the politics may be on that peninsula, there is a profound sensitivity to life and writing among people such as Mr. Streever.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Warmth for Cold, August 6, 2009

By 

Dennis Haarsager (Washington, DC, United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places (Hardcover)

With so much heat in our future -- global warming, Dante's Inferno, the aging Sun enlarging to swallow the Earth -- why should cold be such a fascinating topic? In long, long time, a leading theory of the end of the universe called "heat death" says that absolute cold is the fate of us all -- or at least of our atomic remains. Cold, in other words, is the natural order of things.

Streever does a great job of describing the effects of this inevitability in this intellectually compelling yet entertaining book. We read that the Earth was itself once a frozen planet "only" 700m years back (the Earth is 4.5b years old). We see how life is impacted by and adjusts itself to the effects of cold. We see how cold ends life when these adjustments fail. And sometimes, as is the case with mammoths, cold preserves specimens for millennia to teach us about life in the distant past.

The scientist/author is an Alaskan and the book is accordingly heavy with Alaska references, but there is about an equal portion of references from the rest of the planet. He writes stylishly in something of a journal format.

It's a great read.