Powell’s Q&A: Bill Streever
Posted by Bill Streever, January 18, 2013 10:00 am
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Describe your latest book.
My latest book — that is, my latest completed book — is Heat. Heat, simply put, is about all things hot. It is a natural sequel to my book Cold, really just a march up the thermometer from where Cold left off. But what a topic! It is warm bloodedness and fever, the first appearance of fire on earth, cooking, climate change, fuels like wood and peat and coal and oil, historical figures like Galileo Galilei and Mark Twain and Charles Dickens and Captain James Cook, volcanoes, the sun, and the beginning of the universe. And it is a topic that let me wander in places I would have otherwise missed — ambling ill-equipped into deserts, stepping across recently hardened lava just inches above the earth's inner red glow, and walking barefoot over burning coals. It bound me to scientists like Faraday and Lavoisier and Tyndall. It gave me an excuse to taste crude oil and a reason to hike 70 miles to a site once coveted by Edward Teller, father of the ...
