Customer Reviews

Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places

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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.

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 Throughout the book, he blends technical observation with historical reference, literary allusion, and personal memoir.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.

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.

Bill Streever's "Cold: Adventures in the World's Coldest Places," is at once a splendid travel narrative and a sort of "Cryogenics For Dummies." Streever has that unique ability to convey complex scientific principles and theories in an accessible and readable manner. More than this, though, he delievers highly evocative descriptions of landscapes and nature, or cities and citizens, and he includes plenty of subtle wit and dry humor.

Sentences such as "The red fox, the tiger, the wolf, the wolverine, and the raven all cross biome boundaries as if they did not exist, as if they have never read an ecology textbook or studied a biome map," can be, for the right kind of reader, laugh-out-loud funny.

Or try this for understated whimsy: "On the mountainsides above Anchorage, chinook winds can reach hurricane strength. The loss of roofs from hillside houses is not unknown, giving wealthy homeowners exceptional but unexpected views of crisp winter skies."

Much of the last quarter of the book is devoted to global warming. Though he makes his position clear, Streever is not an ideologue, content to discuss the facts, contemplate the consequences, and ultimately, to acknowledge that even in the worst case scenario, we occupy a minuscule slice in the grand sweep of time.

This book is a refreshing blast of cold air.For someone who is familiar with much of both Arctic and Antarctic issues, I was impressed with obtaining more information on both supra and subnivean topics. Weather,climate,animal migration and winter habits,permafrost and various other sundry topics polar and non- polar are touched upon.Global warming was also addressed in a non threatening circuitous way as well as exploration past and present with some references to the giants of polar history and their work within the deep, cold, interiors.Particularly interesting was the discussion of the conquest of cold which is the title of another wonderful book by the same name written by Tom Shachtman back in 1999 which I read and is referred to by Mr.Streever several times and should be read after this one if your interest grows deeper.Cold is well written by a scientist over the course of a years time with globe trotting observations but always returning to his home state of Alaska in what appears to be a sort of grounding for him.The book itself imparts lots of facts and factoids that can only help not hinder one who studies the frigidly wonderful topic of cold.For those in the know this ground may have already been covered by you and some may find it lacking or just National Geographicalish in its approach. But sometimes old dogs can learn new tricks and books like this can generate new areas of inquiry and reference as it did for me. It helps keep it fresh to read new things even at the risk of going over old material.It is recommended as a good primer for the novice to further ones' appreciation of the ice and its expansive history as well as the problems it can cause and may give you a better admiration of your refrigerator or air conditioner for without those people who did the work, those individuals in history who said, "Gee whiz, its hot in here, my food is rotting and I'm sweating like a pig,what can I do about that"? Now you can erect an alter to the men who fixed that for you right in your own freezer.Be that as it may, I found it very enjoyable and breezed through it quite fast.It is written as if you were talking to a real lonely, arctic scientist who doesn't get out much and is both extremely happy and excited to find a willing, captive, listener as topics tend to pop up and drift into another rather fast but you'll be able to follow his bent.So button up with confidence with some useful information on insulating fabrics,ours and the Eskimo's.The mechanisms of frostbite or how the Bose-Einstein condensate, atoms that form at absolute zero,about 460 degrees F. may someday change the world. Read and learn about this facinating corner of science and warm up to the concept of cold.A cup of hot cocoa may be in order. Enjoy the summer while you can, an ice age may be coming soon and just think, if it does, you'll be ready for it.

"Cold" by Bill Streever is a beautifully-written book, one of the best I have read in this genre.

Streever goes on a year-long quest for cold, with a Chapter devoted to each month. In each month he discusses particular "cold events" that occurred in the month, such as the severe US blizzard of January 1888 - the School Children's Blizzard.

These examples are interspersed with personal details of his own life and studies of cold as the year unfolds. In Streever's book this works well, and some of his descriptive passages are very evocative. This is a pleasant change from some other books in the genre that are simply vehicles for narcissistic display by the author. In "Cold" the subject enjoys the limelight, not the author elbowing the actors out of the way.

Some of Streever's anecdotes are truly surprising: lumps of ice falling out of the sky the size of a man in the 19th century, snowflakes 15 inches across. He explains how the Year Without a Summer (1815) contributed to the invention of the bicycle.

He gives an excellent account of hypothermia, and why some of its victims die soon after being rescued.

Streever lives in Alaska, and life there is very different to life in more temperate places. Houses sink as permafrost melts. People burn down their homes trying to un-freeze frozen pipes with blowtorches. Frost heave pushes posts out of the ground.

Most living tissue cannot survive being frozen. Streever gives some graphic accounts of how freezing affects cells. So I am not too optimistic for the future of James Bedford, who has been stored in liquid nitrogen since 1967, awaiting a cure for cancer.

Remarkably, a surprising number of living creatures can survive freezing. There is a caterpillar in Alaska that routinely "hibernates" over winter by freezing solid, and thawing out in spring to go about its business. Some frogs freeze. The most striking example of cold tolerance is the African desert fly that can even survive liquid helium at -450 degrees F.

When skiing I get ravenously hungry. Streever explains why this is so. Apart from the calories needed to sustain vigorous exercise, we also need a remarkable amount of energy simply to counteract the effects of cold. Early Polar explorers did not appreciate this aspect of nutrition sufficiently when planning food supplies for their expeditions and many died because they simply did not have enough food.

One could go on listing the fascinating aspects of cold discussed in the book. Naturally, not everything can be included. But I would have liked some mention of cold-induced brittle fracture of Liberty ships in World War 2. Twelve Liberty ships broke in half without warning because the grade of steel used suffered from embrittlement. Ships in the North Atlantic were exposed to temperatures that could fall below a critical point and thus the hull could fracture relatively easily.

Thoroughly fascinating read. Streever exposes a most peculiar world that few of us will experience. If there's any criticism I can levy toward the book it's that I wanted more. When you're sorry you've reached the end, that's a good sign to me. I recommend this highly to anyone with an interest in the natural world.

You can bet that Bill Streever likes cold better than you do. After all, standing in his swimming shorts in wind, rain, and a chill of 51 degrees, he plunges into the 35 degree water of Prudhoe Bay, three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, for five minutes. You won't be surprised that he finds it cold, bitingly cold, but advises us that it's not really so cold, in the scheme of things - it is much warmer than a block of dry ice, which is warmer than liquid nitrogen, which is warmer than the surface of Pluto. After five minutes in the water, shivering, he emerges, but it is two hours before he feels warm again. His dip is just the starting immersion into cold in _Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places_ (Little, Brown). Streever is a biologist who works on various surveys and committees, many having to do with climate and climate change. "Cold is cool," he says, and his book emphasizes how interesting low temperatures are, with the way animals have evolved to handle them and the way humans have pioneered into polar regions. There is, however, a good deal of grim death here, from frozen mammoths to explorers to cryogenically frozen corpses. Streever can write poetically, and always has a good humor. His book is full of science, but it is casually written in twelve chapters, each accounting for a month in which he tells us of his travels and interests in the cold regions. It is discursive, with one topic or anecdote popping up in different aspects in different chapters, a friendly and informative science book.

For instance, Streever frequently returns to James Bedford, who died of cancer in 1967, but who is lying around at 367 degrees below zero, waiting for a cancer cure. Ice crystals have damaged the cells too much for Bedford's life to return, but maybe he just viewed that as a problem that future scientists will solve, along with curing his cancer. He might have taken heart from the members of the animal kingdom who so intrigue Streever. For instance, frogs freeze. Not all frogs, just those specially adapted to do so. "To be clear, these are not frogs that are cold, but frogs that are literally frozen. Pick them up, and they are hard as ice." They have ice between their cells and in body cavities, but the cells themselves are so full of glucose as an antifreeze that the ice does not shred them. They are, Streever says, "frogsicles". Streever has been absorbed by the journals kept by the great polar explorers. "When one reads past the stoicism and heroics, the history of polar exploration becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary." If the extremes of earthly cold are not enough, Streever introduces us to some of the scientists who are pushing the thermometer as close to the bottom as it can ever go. Cold is the absence of heat, the absence of molecular motion, and there might not seem to be any logical reason that the molecules and their constituent atoms should all stand still at absolute zero. This temperature, which is 460 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, seems to be unattainable; a couple of thousand atoms have been cooled to within fifty-billionths of a degree of this goal, but getting all the way there has so far proved impossible.

Streever manages a review of our understanding of the deep history of climate. 700 million years ago, there was a mean temperature of minus sixty degrees, according to the "Snowball Earth" idea, which Streever presents as science strongly colored by the forceful personality of the man who first proposed it. He takes us through the ice ages, and the effects of ancient glaciation on the geology of different parts of the world. He invokes the "Little Ice Age", which started in the fourteenth century and continued to the mid-nineteenth. It included the enormous eruption of the Indonesian Tambora volcano in 1815, which among other things, chilled the weather so that Lord Byron's guests had to hole up in his retreat near Geneva in 1816, telling ghost stories. This included Mary Shelley, who came up with _Frankenstein_; the movies don't show that much of the novel involves an Arctic setting complete with an explorer and his boat. Of course Streever covers global warming, late into his year-long exploration of cold regions, explaining the positions of the "climate change kooks" and the "naysayers", but of course he sides on the compelling data that the warming is real. He notes, however, that the warming is not even; changes in ocean currents may actually cool Europe and even the Antarctic interior. "There will still be opportunities to wear a double layer of caribou skin," he reflects, and you can count on Streever to take them.

2 mitten-enclosed thumbs up on this book. If you are looking for a sublime description of sublimation...you have found it. I have never been north of the Artic circle but after reading this first rate book, I've put it on the *list*. Even though it is the height of summer in the northern hemisphere, there is never a better time to curl up with this book.

In "Cold" Streever, a modern-day wonderer and wanderer of the North, documents, with Nordic poeticism of Knut Hamsun, the challenge and the opportunity of cold. The book is replete with intriguing "cold" trivia that prompt a range of unexpected reading associations (ranging from cosmic to existential). Perhaps, the only cold-factoid Streever overlooked is the one about naked Tibetan monks drying up icy-wet sheets in the middle of winter by having somehow figured out how to burn off the "brown" fat on demand. As a cold-shower "fanatic" and an occasional winter-swimmer myself, I enjoyed reading "Cold" in the first week of August as a kind of vicarious winter-swimming dip. Take a plunge: read "Cold."
Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

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