It's been a while, but another book to review.
It's also a bit outdated, now 20 years old. Stories from a Heated Earth is an excercise to take on the globe's soaking opportunities and explain how their culture views them. In taking this task on, it's not only a huge task to align the various cultures, it has also proven to be even more difficult to align the authors, as each chapter has a different author. So though you do get the odd chapter with new cultural insights, there are others which only list the hot springs of nation x or y. Not much of a story.
So other than the above what did I learn?
Well, despite the huge effort to see the book read, I was made aware that Roman soaking culture was in fact a duplication of Etruscan culture which relied heavily on connecting hot springs in the Tuscan setting. Then how Greek gave even religious significance to hot springs. How cranes were rumoured to spend time in Korean hot springs so as heal wounds to their legs. Or the connection between the original inhabitants of north America and the then existing hot springs. So not all bad.
There is a possibly better review, this from P. and R. DiPippo (University of Massachusetts) that starts as follows:
'Fact or fiction? People in several Korean communities got so fed up with lepers and other diseased folks over-running their villages to bathe in their hot springs that they poisoned the springs with dead dogs and even buried the springs so they could no longer be used.
Fact or fiction? Icelanders complained about the nuisance of hot springs on their farms to convince the tax assessor to set a low value on their properties.
Fact or fiction? The French Revolution nearly lead to the destruction of the geothermal district heating system at Chaudes-Aigues that had been operating smoothly since the 1300s.
All of those are true and represent but a few of the fascinating items to be found in Stories from a Heated Earth - Our Geothermal Heritage. This handsome volume is a collection of articles skillfully assembled into 34 chapters by three editors well-known in the geothermal community: R. Cataldi from Italy, S. F. Hodgson from California, and J. W. Lund from Oregon. There are stories from at least 41 countries, written by 47 individual authors, within its 588 pages'.
The review itself is 3 pages long and seems this pitch is to justify the outlay maybe?
But if willing to invest the time and effort there may be some stories within that might pique your interest.
Reference:
Cataldi, R., S. F. Hodgson, J.W. Lund (Eds., 1999) - Stories from a heated earth. Geothermal Resources Council, Davis, U.S.A. & International Geothermal Association, Bonn, Germany.
