Going to Extremes: Mud, Sweat and Frozen Tears - Softcover

Middleton, Nick

3.81

106 ratings by Goodreads

9780330493840: Going to Extremes: Mud, Sweat and Frozen Tears

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0330493841 ISBN 13: 9780330493840

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, 2003

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In Going to Extremes, Nick Middleton visits the world's hottest, coldest, wettest, and driest inhabited places. He visits Oymyakon in Siberia, where the average winter temperature is -47 degrees, then Arica in Chile, where there have been 14 consecutive years without a drop of rain, and Dalol in Ethiopia—known as the "hell hole of creation," where the temperature remains at 94 degrees year round. Middleton considers how and why people lives in these harsh environments. He looks at the way both the population, and the flora and fauna, have adapted physically to the climate, and also considers the psychological impact of living under such conditions.

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From the Publisher:

In Going to Extremes, Nick Middleton, a travel writer with a penchant for some of the more bizarre outposts of human habitation, ventures to the hottest, driest, coldest, and wettest inhabited places on Earth. He wants to know not only how people manage to live in these places, but also why they settled there in the first place. And, most intriguing of all—why they stay. He follows Stalin’s “Road of Bones” across Siberia’s icy wilderness to the world’s coldest town, then crosses the world’s oldest desert, the Atacama, to visit its driest. He descends into the cauldron of the Danakil Depression to suffer the searing intensity of an Ethiopian summer, then wades through the Indian monsoon to reach the world’s rainiest hills. Whether he’s risking castration in “the hell hole of creation” or facing the trauma of giant vampire slugs, Nick Middleton’s account of his journey to the edge is never less than fascinating.

About the Author:

Nick Middleton is a physical geographer who specialises in desertification. Going to Extremes is a television programme for Channel 4 about extreme lifestyles, in which Middleton experienced life in the hostile conditions other cultures must endure.

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