Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places

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.

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.

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. [...]

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.

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.