John Edward Huth is Donner Professor of Science in the Physics Department at Harvard University.
One of the repeated themes of The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is
that even the most confused of us can improve our navigational
understanding by paying closer attention to the world around us… A
learned and encyclopedic grab bag, packed with information drawn
from study and Huth’s own experience.
*Washington Post*
It’s a great reference, filled with personal and historical
anecdotes and fascinating bits of physics, astronomy, oceanography,
and meteorology. And that’s one of Huth’s central points: To find
your way in a world without maps, you can’t rely on any single
cue—you need to make the best of whatever combination of cues is
available to you… With a little study, The Lost Art of Finding Our
Way could be your guide to reconnecting with the navigational aids
in the world around you.
*Wired*
John Huth’s The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a book for anyone
who’s ever cursed themselves for not being able to get home by way
of the stars and winds. Or for anyone who wants to learn how the
Vikings and others once managed to.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Full of wisdom that is fast disappearing in an age of satnav and
GPS.
*The Guardian*
[Huth’s] exuberance shines through: he makes gadgets in his garage
and narrates adventures at sea. Huth’s is a book filled with joy
about what we might term the everyday mathematics of living on the
Earth… Huth is concerned that we have become desensitized to our
physical environment because of technology such as smartphones and
global positioning systems, which do the work of plotting and
routefinding for us. To live in what Huth dubs ‘the bubble’ created
by such devices is to lose not only our wonder at the world but
also a bundle of precious survival skills. To be able to find our
way in the world is to reconnect with its value in a virtuous
spiral of environmental awareness.
*Times Higher Education*
The book offers a clear, comprehensive, and entertaining short
course in navigation that draws on Earth science, history,
anthropology, neuroscience, archaeology, and linguistics. It
provides both a primer on navigational techniques and a tour
through ‘the historical evolution of way finding.’ Huth punctuates
instruction on celestial navigation and reading wind, weather, and
currents with engaging stories and images. These are derived from
sources as varied as the oral histories of Pacific Islanders and
Inuit hunters, Homer’s Odyssey, Icelandic sagas, navigational
tables from the medieval Islamic world, and contemporary news
reports and sailing accounts.
*Science*
Humanity’s lust for exploring terra incognita shaped and tested our
prodigious capacity for mental mapping. Now, with the advent of the
Global Positioning System, wayfaring skills are on the wane.
Physicist John Edward Huth turns explorer in this rich,
wide-ranging and lucidly illustrated primer on how to find yourself
in the middle of somewhere. Huth’s prescription for navigating fog,
darkness, open ocean, thick forests or unknown terrain rests first
on harnessing compass, Sun and stars; then on the subtleties of
weather forecasting and decoding markers such as the wind, waves
and tides.
*Nature*
[An] irresistible book… Huth has an affable, smart tone, as
welcoming as a Billy Collins poem. His knowledge of way-finding and
its history is rangy and detailed, but his enthusiasm never
flickers, lifting the educational factor to higher ground:
rewarding, artful, ably conveying what can be some fairly abstruse
material, the finer points of navigation being among them. There
are, by the way, many, many fine points regarding navigation, and
if Huth gets a bit windy in pointing them out, well, let the wind
blow. It’s refreshing.
*Barnes & Noble Review*
Early humans learned to navigate on land and sea by watching the
world around them… Huth recovers some of this history by looking at
Norse legends, the records of Arab traders moving across the Indian
Ocean and Pacific Islanders… Huth’s subject is fascinating… We have
lost many of our innate abilities on the way to this
technologically advanced moment in time. But John Edward Huth
believes, and his book shows, that some of what was lost can still
be found. We just need to relearn how to read the signs.
*Literary Review*
Lamenting the loss of navigational skills, [Huth] set out to
collect in one volume the many schemes that kept our forebears
alive. Ancient explorers could, through navigational nous,
undertake voyages over great expanses of ocean and land to
establish settlements and trade routes, and return home.
*Chronicle of Higher Education*
Just as we are said to have abandoned the art of memory when we
started writing things down, so Huth says that we have lost our
instinct for knowing how to get from here to there. Before the
scientific revolution we had the ability to interpret environmental
information that enabled us to navigate long distances. Huth
surveys Pacific Islanders, medieval Arab traders, Vikings and early
Western European travellers before examining techniques for
navigators to look to the stars for astronomical beacons, as well
as to the weather and the water.
*The Times*
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