An adventurous ride through the most blisteringly hot regions of science, history, and culture.
Melting glaciers, warming oceans, droughts-it's clear that today's world is getting hotter. But while we know the agony of a sunburn or the comfort of our winter heaters, do we really understand heat?
A bestselling scientist and nature writer who goes to any extreme to uncover the answers, Bill Streever sets off to find out what heat really means. Let him be your guide and you'll firewalk across hot coals and sweat it out in Death Valley, experience intense fever and fire, learn about the invention of matches and the chemistry of cooking, drink crude oil, and explore thermonuclear weapons and the hottest moment of all time-the big bang.
Written in Streever's signature spare and refreshing prose, HEAT is an adventurous personal narrative that leaves readers with a new vision of an everyday experience-how heat works, its history, and its relationship to daily life.
Bill Streever, a biologist and affiliate faculty member with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, likes to say that he sees the world through the twin lenses of science and history. He is the bestselling nature writer behind Cold, Heat, and And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind. As a scientist, he has worked on issues ranging from the environmental effects of underwater sound to the evolution of cave crayfish to the restoration of tundra wetlands to climate change. With his wife, marine biologist Lisanne Aerts, he lives aboard the 51-year-old cruising sailboat Rocinante, currently in Central America. When he is not busy fixing the boat, he spends his time sailing, reading, diving, hiking, rowing his dinghy, paddling his kayak, and, of course, writing.
