Heat: Adventures in the World's Fiery Places

by Bill Streever

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316215282
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	01/15/2013
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Bill Streever is the bestselling and award-winning author of And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind , Cold, and Heat. As a biologist, he has worked on issues ranging from climate change to the restoration of Arctic tundra to underwater noise to the evolution of cave crayfish. With his wife and co-captain, he splits his time between Alaska and their cruising sailboat, currently in Central America.

Table of Contents

A Note on Degrees Fahrenheit xi

Preface: A Candle's Flame xiii

Chapter 1 Raving Thirst 3

Chapter 2 Unmanaged Fire 43

Chapter 3 Cooked 79

Chapter 4 My Children Eat Coal 109

Chapter 5 Rock Oil 142

Chapter 6 Steaming Mountains 175

Chapter 7 Boom 210

Chapter 8 The Top of the Thermometer 244

Acknowledgments 273

Notes 279

Index 333

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"He adeptly explains scientific principles and their applications in human terms, and via specific examples. It's almost as if Streever has hit upon a winning formula for popular-science writing that doesn't...dumb down the substantive science.... Streever has a nice touch. He variously makes you think and smile. Sometimes he achieves both at the same time." — Winnipeg Free Press

PRAISE FOR COLD:

"Original and organic: it is flinty and tough-minded, with just enough humor glowing around the edges to keep you toasty and dry...Streever's prose does what E. L. Doctorow said good writing is supposed to do, which is to evoke sensation in the reader ... This book is chilling in too many ways to count." — Dwight Garner's Top Ten Books of 2009, New York Times

"Cold is a love song to science and scientists, to Earth and everything that lives on and flies over and tunnels under it. It's impossible to read the book and not fully realize that our planet must be protected." — Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review

"Fascinating...Streever's affection for cold offers intellectual air conditioning." — Irene Wanner, Los Angeles Times

Editorial Reviews

Streever’s follow-up to his 2010 New York Times bestseller, Heat, follows a structure as he explores any place hot or anything that creates heat, like Death Valley, forest fires, coal, oil, nuclear bombs, cooking, and volcanoes. There is stream of consciousness in Streever’s style: a chapter that starts with a walk in the desert can contain tangents about 18th-century scientist Lavoisier, heat stroke, nuclear test sites, fevers, firewalking, hyponatremia, and the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. But it’s delivered in funny, matter-of-fact prose, as when describing his ineptitude at starting a fire (“If the world were populated by people like me, we would still be living in trees and eating fruit. Climate change would not be an issue”). In this worthy companion to Cold, Streever is able to mix the pop science, personal experiences, and historic asides into a fun and informative commentary on a subject that few people think about despite its inherent life and death implications. 12 b&w illus. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2014 Nautilus Award Silver Winner

PRAISE FOR HEAT:

"An illuminating romp sure to delight connoisseurs of extreme geography and ignite everyone's inner pyromaniac." — David R. Montgomery, author of The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood

"In this worthy companion to Cold, Streever is able to mix the pop science, personal experiences, and historic asides into a fun and informative commentary on a subject that few people think about despite its inherent life and death implications." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"This book, equally engaging and filled with fascinating facts, will appeal to old and young, and likely sell like superheatedcakes." — The Huffington Post

"Streever's book is rangy and free-form.... Evocative scientific explanations also punctuate his exploits.... He clearly has an affinity for extremes and a gutsy, undaunted spirit that enlivens both his inquiries and his writing." — Smithsonian Magazine

"Engaging, easy-to-read, free-ranging exploration of a natural phenomenon. Funny and factual blend of science, history, and adventure." — Kirkus Reviews

"Bill Streever has now covered the full spectrum. As he did with his previous book, Cold, Heat reminds us that our survival depends on maintaining ourselves within a very narrow range of temperature, but Streever has gone ahead and surveyed the extremes." — The Daily Beast

A "thoroughly entertaining companion volume.... Streever operates in some of the same territory as Mary Roach and Bill Bryson: taking on big, serious topics, and making them entertaining without making them trivial, inserting himself into the narrative without overwhelming the material. This is a fine balancing act." — The San Francisco Chronicle

"Bill Streever is an able guide into the flaming regions of our beleaguered evirons... a rare nature book, a pleasing mix of first-person narrative and layman science. The facts come fast and furious but are served on a platter of digestible prose." — The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Streever's easy-going, colourful prose is at its best in his vivid descriptions of historical events." — The New Scientist

"Confronted in 2009 with the best-selling success of "Cold," biologist Bill Streever was all but obligated to take on "Heat," but he's done it with more verve and creativity, giving readers a virtual page-turner ... He writes cleverly, clearly, at times beautifully ... He's a friendly tour guide, with a wry sense of humor." — The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Streever has a knack for explaining scientific phenomena to a general readership, confidently surveying both the historical development of scientific research and chemical reactions." — The New Republic

"He adeptly explains scientific principles and their applications in human terms, and via specific examples. It's almost as if Streever has hit upon a winning formula for popular-science writing that doesn't...dumb down the substantive science.... Streever has a nice touch. He variously makes you think and smile. Sometimes he achieves both at the same time." — Winnipeg Free Press

"HEAT can't help but ignite interest among those of us emerging from the back end of a monumentally miserable winter." — The Cleveland Plain Dealer

From the Publisher

Fascinating...Streever's affection for cold offers intellectual air conditioning.
— Los Angeles Times

Irene Wanner

Cold is a love song to science and scientists, to Earth and everything that lives on and flies over and tunnels under it. It's impossible to read the book and not fully realize that our planet must be protected.
— New York Times Book Review

Mary Roach

From the author of Cold (2009), another engaging, easy-to-read, free-ranging exploration of a natural phenomenon. Streever mingles his personal adventures with heat and hot places with tidbits about early mistaken notions about heat, current events and research involving it, and narratives of those who have lived through its toughest challenges. Opening with a scene in which he tests his endurance by holding his hand over an open flame, the author then recounts his own experiences in the blistering, dry heat of the American Southwest. From natural heat, Streever moves on to unmanaged heat (wild fires and their disastrous effects), controlled fires, cooking, peat mining and Iron Age smelting. The author also humorously recounts his own hapless attempts to master the art of starting a fire. To give a sense of Streever's scope and technique, his chapter on petroleum features a brief history of oil drilling in the United States, a visit to a museum on the site of Drake Well in Pennsylvania, a taste of oil, a canoe trip down a nearby creek and an interview with a refinery engineer in Alaska; his treatment of volcanoes includes not only the mechanisms underlying eruptions and Pliny's description of the eruption of Vesuvius, but an extensive account of his own trip to Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park, where he attempted to make popcorn on freshly hardened lava. At the end, the author recounts his pleasant chat with a physicist and his impressions of the pipes inside the supercollider at Brookhaven, where temperatures of trillions of degrees are produced. Although not aimed at the young, this funny and factual blend of science, history and adventure would make an ideal gift for an inquisitive adolescent.

Kirkus Reviews