快猫短视频

HEAT. Burning, searing, scorching. Without it, life on Earth would be impossible, and yet the range of temperatures within which life can survive is extremely narrow.

鈥淲ithout heat, life would be impossible, yet the range of temperatures in which life can survive is narrow鈥�

In a follow up to his 2009 book, Cold, Bill Streever embarks on a trip across the world in a quest to see and experience places with extremes of heat 鈥� and to investigate the extremes to which we have gone to generate it.

He wanders Death Valley to feel a modicum of the effects that intense heat has on the body. He visits stretches of America burned out by wild fires, Hawaiian volcanoes and an underground nuclear bomb testing site. He peppers his experiences with anecdotes related to his travels 鈥� the physiological impacts of heat exhaustion, of burns, the destruction wrought by wild fires, a brief history of atomic bombs, industrialisation and our use of peat, coal and oil. All the while, he teases the reader with the promise that at some point he鈥檒l face the bizarre personal challenge of heat endurance: walking on hot coals.(Spoiler: he ultimately does.)

Streever鈥檚 easy-going, colourful prose is at its best in his vivid descriptions of historical events. But there鈥檚 something a bit distasteful about his personal journey. He steals two bricks of peat from a small museum in Holland, a lump of coal from a plant pot in a cafeteria of the Ruhr Museum in Germany. It is odd behaviour given that at times this book seems to be a thinly veiled environmentalist lament about how humanity has immorally used technology like bombs and fossil fuel burning to destructive and climate warming ends.

Ultimately, though, the book鈥檚 flaws are greater than admissions of petty theft. On its own, each adventure is pleasant enough to read, but these parts fail to come together as Streever meanders over his subject like a lazy lava flow. The hunt for ever-increasing temperatures unfortunately left me cold.