The Lost Art of Finding Our Way – John Edward Huth

Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. In his new book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way, 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 book 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.

Part treatise, part travelogue, and part navigational history, Huth's narrative brings our own world into sharper view.