Bill Streever

Bill Streever is a biologist and science writer who turns field observation, environmental history, and personal experiment into accessible narrative nonfiction. Cold follows a year-long exploration of low temperatures, beginning with an Arctic swim and moving through glaciers, permafrost, hibernation, polar expeditions, refrigeration, and the physics of absolute zero. The 2009 Little, Brown edition bears the subtitle Adventures in the World's Frozen Places. Reviewers noted that Streever avoids a textbook structure, arranging scientific explanation beside travel episodes and historical stories. His professional experience as an Alaskan biologist informs the ecological sections, especially his attention to how organisms survive winter conditions. The book later gained a thematic counterpart in Heat, and Streever continued writing about wind and the ocean. Cold establishes the pattern clearly: one physical force becomes a route through many disciplines, while the author's firsthand encounters keep scale and sensation visible. Readers meet both a broad natural history of cold and a working scientist testing how abstract temperature becomes lived experience.