Campaign for the American Reader: Five of the best books on heat waves and hot places

Sunday, June 09, 2013

Five of the best books on heat waves and hot places

Biologist Bill Streever wrote the national bestseller, Cold, and the follow up, Heat. He lives with his son, Ish Streever, his partner and wife, marine biologist Lisanne Aerts, and the

resident dog, Lucky (who was adopted from Sakhalin, Russia) in Anchorage, Alaska. The four of them ski, hike, dive, bike, and camp as often as time and their varying abilities allow.

One of five top books on heat waves and hot places that Streever named for the Wall Street Journal:

Arabian Sands
by Wilfred Thesiger (1959)

Wilfred Thesiger's memoir integrates the extreme heat of the desert with the extreme toughness of an old-school adventurer, of the Bedouin with whom he traveled on foot and on camelback, and of the land itself, which, he writes, "knows nothing of gentleness or ease." From 1945 to 1950, Thesiger roamed the largest sand desert on earth, usually armed due to the threat of warring tribes. "I was always hungry and usually thirsty," he writes. During one seven-month trip, he covered 2,000 miles on two pints of water a day, a seemingly impossible feat. His writing is as matter-of-fact as his approach to survival. "It was a place of shadows but not of shade, where the sun beat down, and the heat struck back again from the calcined rocks." Thesiger uses short and often beautiful sentences: "A cloud gathers," he writes, "the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die." He describes one trip as lucky when some rain fell and four of his group's 18 camels survived. "Arabian Sands" offers not only a view of a seared landscape but also pictures of one part of the Middle East in the days before oil wealth arrived and of a man willing to forsake the privileges of the British upper class in exchange for knowledge of the desert and, ultimately, of himself.