How long does it take to read The Lost Art of Finding Our Way?
John Edward Huth
The Lost Art of Finding Our Way by John Edward Huth takes about 9 hours 52 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 9 hours 52 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2013. 538 pages, about 147,950 words.
20 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 16 hours 26 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 9 hours 52 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 10 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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. - Jacket.
Subjects: Naval art and science, Navigation, History, Navigation, history
