| The Natural Navigator |  | Author: Tristan Gooley
Publisher: Virgin Books
Category: Book
List Price: £14.99
Buy New: £5.72
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Seller: OneToRemember
Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 1,600
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.6 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 1905264941
EAN: 9781905264940
Publication Date: March 4, 2010
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Bending natural science, myth, folklore and the history of travel, this title introduces you to the rare and ancient art of finding your way using nature's own sign-posts, from the feel of a rock to the look of the moon.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
 The Natural Navigator July 26, 2010
Graeme Dinnen
This book jumped off the pages of Amazon to me. It is a superb analysis of what most of us have forgotten about our natural world. Definitely one for the desert island.
 A very interesting read July 22, 2010
P. Ferbrache (United Kingdom)
I would recommend this book to anyone interested in roaming outdoors, hill walking, jungle walking, desert expedition, artic navigation or sailing. The author explains how to navigate in almost any environment on earth. Great detail is given on reading natural signs in an aid to navigation. Things like trees, moss, puddles, stars, sand dunes ect are all covered. (too many to list them all). I only gave four stars as I personally felt that a few more diagrams and pictures would greatly enhance the book.
 Buy a map and a compass instead July 15, 2010
I. Saunders (Reading, Berks United Kingdom)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is a very disappointing book, which has left me no better equipped to navigate than I was before reading it.
In a nutshell, the book boils down to finding the points of the compass, which most of us can do (pole star/direction of midday sun). Unless your brief is to sail North in an outrigger canoe from a Poynesian Island, this book is pretty useless as a means of getting from A to B in, say, a northern temperate location, or anywhere else that a likely reader is likely to find themself.
Gooley doesn't just cover navigation, but just about anything that has a direction: wind, bird flight, ocean current, lemming migration, and so on. And this is his big mistake, as his favourite direction (as a writer at least) is "at a tangent". Consequently, what could have been 40 pages of information ranging from the blindingly obvious to the fairly useful, has been swollen by the inclusion of another 200 pages of waffle. If you are tempted to take this book somewhere really remote as an aid to navigation, you will likely die of thirst or sunstroke before finding the useful information! For example, he demolishes the notion that moss grows on the North side of trees in a sentence, but then whitters on for three pages about why it (and other lower plants) grows where it does, which is of no use in direction finding.
Furthemore, his excursions off the track also reveal his own misunderstanding of what he is (generally irrelevantly or obviously) trying to describe. For example, on page 112 he states (with reference to travelling on the surface of the Earth) that "the shortest route between two points is very rarely a straight line". Unless one has an amazing burrowing machine, it is ALWAYS a straight line (in as much as it doesn't deviate to the left or right). He rightly calls this path a "great circle", and then reveals the source of his (and now our) confusion by stating that "the paths on longhaul flights often show a curve". How else can straight lines on the surface of a sphere be rendered on a 2D map?
At the foot of page 171 Gooley tells us that "The Inca empire was fuelled in part by harvesting the guano from the birds that thrived off the fish, who thrived off the plankton that thrived in the cold water that flowed north to replace the water that the Gulf Stream had taken away". This is just plain wrong, as the Gulf Stream is a warm current in the North Atlantic fed by water from west Africa, while the Inca's guano birds rely on the cold Humboldt current in the South Pacific, separated from the Gulf Stream by several thousand miles and the Panama isthmus.
On page 179 he discusses differences in the colour of the sea, saying "the broadest effect is caused by differences in levels of salt in the water and the impact this has on micro-organic life". Wrong again. The primary productivity of the sea is determined by the availability of sunlight and nutrients. Certainly, high levels of salt (such as in the Dead Sea) prevent most organisms surviving, but even the salty Mediterranean (which he goes on to discuss) contains areas full of fish (e.g. the northen coasts). It's blueness is is actually a result of it being fed mainly by nutrient-depleted water from the Atlantic. Some of the most productive fisheries in the world are in waters that have a high salt content because of rapid evaporation under a tropical sun, such as those off the west coast of Africa.
As any casual walker in the UK will tell you, a knowledge of the directions of the point of the compass is not enough to get you from A to B: you need to know where you are, where you are heading and what barriers to direct travel exist between them. Intimate knowledge of your home patch - a mental map - lets you choose the most efficient route, but in unfamiliar areas there is no substitute for a paper map and - if there are no identifiable landmarks - a compass as well. This book's usefulness falls somewhere between what you learnt at school and having a compass.
Be Aware June 4, 2010
Peter Jackson (Derbyshire)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I recommend this book, not just for the skills you can aquire, but for the enthusiasm and encouragement obvious in its pages.
It guides you to be more aware which, if extended into your everyday walking and living, will reward you with a sense of satisfaction.
Sailor's View May 24, 2010
RAEM (Puget Sound, WA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Most the other reviewers seem to be walkers, but the book is very interesting from a sailor's perspective. There is a chapter dedicated to nautical methods, quite a few of which I'd never come across before, but most of the other chapters are relevant too.
The sun, moon, stars and weather can be used at sea to give just as good an idea of direction and the birds are more useful at sea than on land. I don't think I will be ripping out the chartplotter and throwing it overboard yet, but I will definitely be taking more note of the natural clues on offer. The stories about what the navigators in the Pacific can achieve are fascinating. Recommended.'
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
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