Bill Streever - Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places

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.

PRAISE
"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 is a striding tour through a disappearing world....A crisp and bracing little book...chilling in too many ways to count." (New York Times).

"Unexpectedly fascinating.... With simple prose and a strikingly immediate present tense, the author carves landscapes, scientific processes and neat anthropological factoids out of the ice, a style guaranteed to transport readers into the unfamiliar-indeed, otherworldly-dimensions he describes." (Kirkus Reviews).

StartFragment"Consistently enticing....Open this book to any page and be treated to a tidbit about the cold, its effects on animals, on history, on the world....The author knows what he is talking about." (Library Journal).

"COLD is a love song to science and scientists, to Earth and everything that lives on and flies over and tunnels underneath it." (New York Times Book Review (cover review)