Harvard, 10/28/2015. Item #25769
ISBN: 9780674088078

From the Publisher:

Long before GPS and Google Earth, humans traveled vast distances using environmental clues and simple instruments. What is lost when technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way? Illustrated with 200 drawings, this narrative part treatise, part travelogue, and part navigational history brings our own world into sharper view.

Review Quotes:
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.--Iain Finlayson"The Times" (05/18/2013)


544 pages, paperback. Belknap Press 2015.