The Lost Art of Finding Our Way - Rilegato

Huth, John Edward

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674072820 ISBN 13: 9780674072824

Casa editrice: Belknap Pr, 2013

Riassunto

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography,The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fogbank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena—the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, and Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, and Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and “read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents, weather and atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way.

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth’s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, and part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"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." --Anthony Sattin, Literary Review (05/01/2013)

"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. [...] Huth surveys Pacific Islanders, medieval Arabs traders, Vikings and early Western European travelers before examining techniques for navigators to look for stars for astronomical beacons, as well as weather and water." --Times (Saturday), 18/05/2013

"[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 then . 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." --Peter Lewis, Barns and Noble Review, 26/06/13

the book was prompted by the death of two kayakers lost in the fog, which brought home to Huth (a professor of science at Harvard) how GPS and other products of modern technology have obscured are innate capacity to find our way from environmental clues... amounts to a manual of navigational aspects of astronomy, physical oceanography and climatology, and the rudiments of boat design and handling... conveyed in fluent prose which wafts the reader painlessly over some nasty technical reefs: the Ekman sprial say... --Claudio Vita-Finzi, Times Literary Supplement, 18/10/2013

"The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Huth (Harvard ) is full of wisdom that is fast disappearing in an age of satnav and GPS. In its careful observation of the natural world it reminds me of Oliver Rackham s History of the Countryside." --Guardian Readers best books of 2013, 28 December 2013

"If you'd like to lose yourself in a book this winter, John Edward Huth's fascinating book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, makes for enlightening reading on the subject of how civilizations navigated in the days before GPS, Google Earth and global transit" --Welsh Costal Life, 1 November 2013

L'autore:

John Edward Huth is Donner Professor of Science in the Physics Department at Harvard University.

Author's home: Cambridge, MA

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Belknap Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0674072820
• ISBN 13: 9780674072824
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 528