In 1996, I spent the summer tucked away with my family in our pre-broadband, barely heated Colorado cabin. Itching for adventure, on August 1(my 14th birthday), I begged my dad to take us to a glacier. After feigned resistance and much cautioning, he agreed, and we set off on horseback through Rocky Mountain National Park along a 40-mile trail that wound over the Continental Divide.

Our destination was Tyndall Glacier, one of the region's few remaining hunks of ice.

We didn't make it. A patch of snow obscured the bouldered trail, making it too dangerous for even our surefooted mounts. I cried as we turned back. Climate change wasn't yet weighing on my mind, so it hadn't occurred to me that something less tangible might someday pull the glacier farther from my reach. I'd simply spent the entire summer dreaming of that gleaming white, chiseled slab of ice, and it crushed me to abandon it after coming so near.

I was -- and still am -- a sucker for cold.

That enthusiasm came rushing back as I opened Bill Streever's book Cold, which expertly weaves together the biology, history, and physical environment of the world's coldest spots. Streever, an ecologist living in Alaska, shares my love of all things chilly, and he engages the subject as only a dedicated scientist and Arctic aficionado could: by experimenting.

On himself.

In the book's opening scene, Streever recounts, thought-by-thought, his five minutes submerged in the 35-degree waters of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. "The only way to do this," he writes, "is with a single plunge. No hesitation." Streever goes on to describe the "shrink-wrapped" sensation of his pores drawing closed, the stinging cold of the ice-slush water  ("as if I am rolling naked through a field of nettles"), and the false alarms of near (but not actual) hyperthermia.

What sets Streever apart, though, is the grace with which he incorporates the science underlying each phenomenon: "I am a victim of physics. My body temperature is moving toward a state of equilibrium with this water, yielding to the second law of thermodynamics. I shiver." The second law dictates that heat flows from a warm body to a cold one - a straightforward concept, yet one that's easily muddled if we forget that "cold" is simply the absence of heat.

Throughout his book, Streever teaches his readers, in only a few words, many of the concepts that physicists spent centuries unraveling. And perhaps most importantly, he keeps the pace brisk. It's as if we're on a chilly morning hike through the woods with our favorite science teacher, not slogging through an outdated science text in an overheated classroom.

Because even the most fascinating science can get boring without characters, Streever intertwines his narrative with stories of historical explorers - most of whom, of course, met cold, gory deaths. But rather than reveling in the gangrenous details, he walks us through the molecular underpinnings of their demise and, in the process, addresses our physiological relationship with "cold."

He uses the 1979 case of Danish fishermen stranded in near-freezing waters to explain the concept of "afterdrop" -- the deadly, sudden fall in body temperature that can occur during rewarming. The fishermen, though pulled from the water alive, began to drop dead one by one as cold blood from their extremities rushed back to their hearts. As the chilled blood settled in their cores, rapidly dropping their body temperatures and interrupting their cardiac rhythms, they became victims of afterdrop.

For someone who clearly loves the cold, the idea that the world might experience less and less of it due to global warming is particularly troubling. Unfortunately, though, Streever's attempts to address this are among the few places where the passages of his book ring hollow, drifting toward the sanctimonious and away from the rich historical and biological threads he's woven throughout the book.

In the end, Streever is at his best when he sticks to celebrating our biological relationship with something that most of us would just as soon avoid -- unless there's a roaring fire and cup of hot cocoa waiting nearby to warm us up.