Cold rivals Harry Potter series in its ability to fascinate, entertain readers of all ages
Author Bill Streever, who chairs the North Slope Science Initiative's Science Technical Advisory Panel, structured Cold with a chapter for every month starting with July. He opens each with an account of his own experience.
Here are a few excerpts from a review of Cold I wrote for Petroleum News:
Streever is the science teacher we all want for our children; a guide who introduces them to the natural world, enticing them away from video games, I-Pods and cell phones.
Unfortunately, Bill Streever is not a teacher, but as an author who brings alive the magic of planet Earth's past, present and future, he's the next best thing. ....
Polar explorers, Streever says in the first chapter, are "great keepers of journals . whose history becomes one long accident report mixed with one long obituary," the details of which he repeatedly shares with us.
In the first chapter, which opens 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, with the author taking a five minute plunge into the Beaufort Sea, we learn about Dutch navigator Vitus Bering. In 1741, "several hundred miles southwest" of where Streever is standing ... Bering "lay down in the sand and died of scurvy and exposure, while his men, immobilized by scurvy, cold, and fear, became food for arctic foxes.
"Some accounts," Streever writes, "hold that Bering spent his last moments listening to the screams and moans of his dying men."
While we are contemplating the horrible deaths of Bering and his men, Streever throws in a geography lesson - the Bering Sea that separates Alaska and Russia, and the island where Bering died, "nestled on the international date line," were both named after him.
Turn the page and we discover that frogs, whose northernmost limit is about five hundred miles south of Streever's bathing spot, overwinter in a frozen state, "amphibian popsicles in the mud. Frogsicles," he calls them. ....
A lesson-bite in the history of measuring temperature becomes more interesting when you learn that Daniel Fahrenheit's invention of the mercury thermometer was "modified by the likes of Galileo, who used wine instead of mercury."
Streever's example of the year following the eruption of Mount Tambora ... in Indonesia in 1815 fixes the destructive nature of volcanic eruptions firmly in a reader's memory.
Volcanic dust in earth's atmosphere acts like a translucent shade on a window, blocking the sun's rays, he writes. Decreased warmth from the sun changes wind and current movements in the Northern Hemisphere....
"The laconic farmers of New England" referred to the year simply as "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death."....
The cold and resultant crop failures around the globe . made horses too expensive ... leading to the invention of what would become the bicycle.
Mary Shelley "was holed up in Lord Byron's lakeside retreat near Geneva in the summer of 1816." The weather, more than a year after Tamura's eruption, "kept Byron's guests indoors. . He challenged them to come up with ghost stories. Shelley came up with Frankenstein. ... The popular impression of the novel today is based on movies that share only a name and a monster with the book," but Streever tells readers that Shelley's novel "starts with letters from an Arctic explorer," who "spots a dogsled pulling a strange creature, the living thing mysteriously created by Dr. Frankenstein," who dies on the boat.
The creature ... "leaps through a cabin window, landing on an ice floe, and drifts off into
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Overview
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-ageClovis tribe from melting glaciers, and he evokes blizzards so ...