Outside the archives of Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy at the American University in Cairo are air conditioning units surrounded by a cooling structure one might assume is from another time: wood lattice mashrabiyya, a time-honored architectural element known for allowing an incoming breeze and a view out from the shade. This observation of the coexistence of temporally distinct technologies is a trademark of On Barak’s style, as is his wandering scholarly gaze that productively diverges from the object of study. In the case of the archive, Barak was reading Fathy’s 1942 play, in which the protagonist, strangely enough, falls in love with mashrabiyya (Barak archly describes the architect’s clunky dialogue as “wooden”) (p. 174). When looking away from the text, or out the window, as it were, Barak finds in the mashrabiyya-covered air conditioning a stranger iteration of these themes. In tracing these contours he has a knack for unraveling the convoluted ways that the material world shapes cultural production and vice versa. The author has successfully deployed this approach in two previous monographs, On Time and Powering Empire. In both books, Barak moves frenetically over period and space, reads omnivorously, and writes with such an affinity for wordplay that, at times, pun approaches method (as in “coalonialism”). In both books, as in the case of the mashrabiyya-covered air conditioning, he seems to swerve away from the apparent subject—whether time or coal—only to make a more intricate point about that subject based on connecting his deep engagement in global history and social theory with a staggering array of historical sources, largely from literature, poetry, and the press.

In approach, Heat, a History is similar, all the way down to the puns (“coastmopolitanism” was a stretch, but I did appreciate “Bad COP” in reference to the climate change conference held at Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022). Barak begins with a critique of what he calls the prevailing “extraterrestrial outlook” on the climate catastrophe, in which half a degree here or there can seem to be the primary realm of political contention, and the planetary scale implies humanity’s shared fate (p. 5). Yet, of course, lost in these approaches are different bodily experiences of local heat, and the fact that we are not all in it together, nor have we ever been. In response, Barak has crafted “a humanist history of heat,” including chapters on sweat, beaches, air-conditioned cinemas, and automobiles in the 20th century, roughly from Beirut to Alexandria, although this summation does not do justice to Barak’s meandering in topic, space, and time (p. 20). Throughout, he explains how people have sought comfort from heat, and how their means of obtaining comfort—often dependent on fossil fuels—only created more heat.

The examination of sweat is characteristically wide-ranging, bizarre, and profound. Barak moves from Sancho Panza daydreaming of Dulcinea’s armpits to glee over the number of Ottoman poems focused on sweat from a selection of 18th-century masters (“over 2 percent!” he exclaims, and most in “very positive terms”) to a Benjamin Franklin interlude and finally the declaration that he and a research assistant watched eighty of the star of midcentury Egyptian cinema Farid Shawqi’s films and “carefully recorded those scenes in which sweat appeared” (pp. 38, 70). This eccentric material should not distract from his striking points. Barak is tracing the way that perspiration—the body’s method of cooling—became undesirable in the Middle East. Plenty of Ottoman love poetry presented sweat as desirable, even erotic, as did those Farid Shawqi films. A glance to the margins of Arabic and Hebrew newspapers, one of his many productive swerves, reveals advertisements for deodorants that suggest the “abjection of sweat” occurred in the 1950s for women and the 1980s for men. At the same time, Barak does not lose sight of colonialism. Prevailing ideas of sweat emerged under empire, leaving “perspiration to people hidden from view” (p. 75). Indeed, in sweatshops. Few readers, I suspect, will be galvanized by Barak’s call for “re-pluralizing the discourse about perspiration,” but I do hope they appreciate him at his best, such as while pondering the cruel irony that people in places like Egypt had to sweat to produce cotton, a commodity that not only made money for the capitalists of Manchester but also produced clothing that sold as “a solution to perspiration” (pp. 75, 51).

As interesting as it can be to follow Barak’s playful approaches and creative claims, the question of causation is handled more effectively in some cases than in others. In the introduction, he takes up the history of Jewish women in mandatory Palestine wearing shorts as a showcase for the overlooked significance of the corporeal experience of heat to history. Their uncovered legs, in Barak’s telling, also received unwanted attention from Palestinian men, which catalyzed Jewish men’s desire to protect them. Although he disclaims “heat determinism” and positions his point as “conjecture,” he nevertheless declares, “It was no accident that the 1929 riots occurred during the summer . . . when people had free time on their hands, and when their arms and legs were exposed” (pp. 27–28). Barak intends what he calls “the shorts exercise” to be more suggestive than substantive, a means of encouraging people to consider heat and history in new ways (p. 29). Indeed, it is eminently plausible, given how often questions of gendered propriety have functioned as a flashpoint for conflict in similar settings. But to make this point while providing no evidence of anyone in Palestine in August 1929 talking about any of these themes is curious, and starkly contrasts with the voluminous evidence of other phenomena Barak discusses.

Nor is this the only case in which Barak describes the libidinal energies of Arab men as an engine of history. In his account of the rise of Cairo’s famous zahma (crowdedness) alongside the rise of personal automobiles, Barak spells out his argument clearly: “Crowdedness on buses and sexual harassment resulting from this close proximity as well as from deregulation pushed anybody who couldn’t take the heat to opt for a private car. Wives left, taking their husbands with them, and emasculated middle-class men compensated for what they had lost with a new car” (p. 221). Derived from a mundane richness of sources, including short stories and jokes, this claim intimately conveys the bodily, gendered experience of these places and their tangled relationship to fossil-fueled heating.

But how accurate is it? One can imagine a different argument from a different scholar based on counting buses, mapping road projects, or tracing parking laws. Not easy, given archival limitations, but also possibly an argument in which the neglect of the state, the schemes of oligarchs, or the organizing of activists rather than the figure of the lascivious man takes center stage. In fact, David Sims has done just this kind of work in Understanding Cairo. Although Barak cites this work, he leaves out how Sims insists that the key change in this period was not the replacement of buses with individual cars but rather the contraction of the public bus sector in the face of private minibuses and the Cairo Metro. To be sure, cars expanded greatly in real terms and played an outsize role in congestion, but Sims describes them as ultimately unimportant in terms of total ridership. Avoiding buses with an individual car was not feasible for most of Cairo’s middle classes.

These critiques aside, Heat, a History deserves a wide readership, given its uniquely kaleidoscopic sense of the world and the pressing bodily costs of the climate crisis. The book merits particular attention from historians, who might benefit from engaging with Barak’s provocative claims and his innovative approaches to sources. While reading, they also should not forget to look out the window, and notice the air conditioning units, or whatever else might appear.