The world warms, awash in greenhouse gases, but forty below remains forty below. Cold is a part of everyday life, but we isolate ourselves from it, hiding in overheated houses and retreating to overheated climates, all without understanding what we so eagerly avoid. We fail to see cold for what it is: the absence of heat, the slowing of molecular motion, a sensation, a perception, the force behind bizarre adaptations.
From frozen humans to ice ages, from hibernating birds to hypothermic explorers, from Frankenstein to absolute zero, Bill Streever's new book, Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places, journeys through history, myth, geography, and ecology in a year-long search for low temperatures.
Cold, a New York Times best seller, is
available in all fine bookstores.
"The meaning of this unexpectedly beautiful and ever-intriguing book gathers and deepens like fresh falling snow. Cold, Bill Streever shows us, shapes life as we know it, and we'll sorely miss it if it goes." -Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us.
COLD
A new book by Bill Streever
"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. . . . 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." - Publisher's Weekly (April 27, 2009)
