A book review of The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs: Use Outdoor Clues to Find Your Way, Predict the Weather, Locate Water, Track Animals – and Other Forgotten Skills by Tristan Gooley
Stars: *****
The Experiment (2014)
Nature
402 pages
Disclosure: I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links.
Summary: Turn every walk into a game of detection―from master outdoorsman Tristan Gooley, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Read a Tree and The Natural Navigator
When writer and navigator Tristan Gooley journeys outside, he sees a natural world filled with clues. The roots of a tree indicate the sun’s direction; the Big Dipper tells the time; a passing butterfly hints at the weather; a sand dune reveals prevailing wind; the scent of cinnamon suggests altitude; a budding flower points south. To help you understand nature as he does, Gooley shares more than 850 tips for forecasting, tracking, and more, gathered from decades spent walking the landscape around his home and around the world. Whether you’re walking in the country or city, along a coastline, or by night, this is the ultimate resource on what the land, sun, moon, stars, plants, animals, and clouds can reveal―if you only know how to look!
The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs
If you want to tap into your ancestor’s knowledge of nature and how to understand it – THIS is your book. It is a big book FULL of text this is a bit slow to read. However that’s because the author is VERY thorough with his sharing of information. So just be forewarned, it’s NOT a quick read.
Each chapter is divided into topics such as trees, plants, weather, sun, moon, night walk, animals, city walk, snow and much more. The topics are gone into quite in depth, with examples given of past nature walks and other times the author used that knowledge. I laughed out loud at the story in the introduction.
Some chapters start with a question such as “How can I tell whether the moon will cooperate with a night walk?” or “How can I use tree leaves as a compass?” Then it goes on to explain, in detail, how that is possible. Most of these things I had no idea WERE possible.
If you are looking to bring back the ways of our ancestors, this guide will teach you a lot.
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