Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass

Book Description

Today's adventurers will learn how to find their way in the wilderness, in towns, in the desert, in snow-covered areas — even on the ocean — by observing birds, animals, weather patterns, vegetation, shifting sands, patterns of snow fields, and the positions of the sun, moon, and stars.

Customer Reviews:

Best Book On The Topic.......2007-06-08

Clear, concise, practical, completely useful. If you really want to find your way without map or compass, then familiarize yourself with the content. First rate!

One of the best books I've ever read.......2006-08-28

This book covers a subject that is oft-neglected, but is very important to anyone and everyone. It is engagingly written by a true expert. As odd as this may seem, given the subject matter, in many places it is near profound.

Very informative.......2006-06-02

This book is an example of why books are great. The knowledge contained in it would be largely lost or very difficult to compile had hte author not taken the time to publish it. He spent his life learning various methods of navigation around the world from many cultures: cultures not assimilated to the modern or western world.

I've always thought it would be fascinating to learn navigation or tracking from a native or someone who has learned information that has been passed down from generation to generation. Low tech, but very skillful. Art more than science. That is exactly what this book teaches.

The most interesting part for me was the explanation of how Polynesians navigated at sea: following migrating birds, seeing land beyond the horizon by watching reflections on the bottom of clouds, wave variation, and star positions.

There is a lot of good information for both land and sea, plus some for air. The author taught naviation to the US Air Force about the middle of the 20th century.

Good, but could be better.......2002-03-13

This book was able to confront the "old wives tales" to finding your way. An excellent guide for those at sea, but little for land travel. It is best if used in harmony with another outdoor survival guide.

Don't get lost without it.......2000-07-03

This book is a reprint of a classic. The author describes tested methods for finding your way using natural signs rather than map and compass. The methods covered range from the usual -- such as stars, the sun and trees -- to less common ones such as the routes of migratory sea birds or seasonal winds.

If you are travelling in the wilderness (or city; there is even a chapter on how to find your way in a strange city), I strongly recommend this book.

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Our Heritage of Flowers. The Official Flowers of the United States and Canada
Fred B. Manchee
Manufacturer: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000QB7DWG

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Our Heritage of Flowers. The Official Flowers of the United States and Canada
Fred B. Manchee
Manufacturer: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000H2G9EC

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Our heritage of flowers;: The official flowers of the United States and Canada (SIP: Special interest publications)
Fred B Manchee
Manufacturer: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

General | Plants | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
General | Botany | Biological Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B0006CEAYY

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POPULAR GARDENING GUIDE TO OUR HERITAGE OF FLOWERS The Official Flowers of the United States and Canada
Fred B Manchee
Manufacturer: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JS5I64

Book Description

Most people do not think of Berlin as a beautiful city, but it is filled with stunning sights, sounds and textures, all the more astonishing when the stories behind them are revealed. Today's Berlin is new and vibrant, but history has left its scars. A look in the right place is rewarded with glimpses of the glories of old Prussia as well as the abominations of Hitler's Third Reich and of the outer bulwark of the Soviet empire. Brian Ladd, a historian who has been returning to Berlin for twenty-five years, pays homage to the familiar landmarks, but he also penetrates into obscure corners of the city and brings them alive with his shrewd and informed comment. He explains what the sights of Berlin have meant to Berliners who coped under kings and dictators, and who toiled, suffered and celebrated as their city was destroyed and rebuilt. This book invites you to share their passions as it draws you into the dynamic new capital that has risen from wreckage of post-war German history. BRIAN LADD is at the State University of New York at Albany. He has been a constant visitor to Berlin over a quarter of a century.

Customer Reviews:

Bound to be a Good Book.......2005-08-20

It's a little deceptive of me to write a review of this book, a book I haven't read yet. But since there were no reviews, I did want to point out how qualified Brian Ladd is to write a companion guide to Berlin. I have just finished reading his "The Ghosts of Berlin" - which I highly recommend - and in it Ladd exhibits a close eye for architectural history and how Berlin, unique among all European capitals, wears its complex and troublesome history on its sleeve, so to speak. The monuments, the buildings - the contentious debates about the design and placement of new buildings - and even the parks and roads all ooze history and make Berlin such a rich place to visit. If Mr. Ladd has brought some of these same observations to his new book, it belongs in your suitcase the next time you visit Berlin.

Book Description

For undergraduate courses in World History I and II.

This text intends to emphasis to students that widespread, deadly disease is not a distant historical phenomenon, but a continuing threat to humanity. It explains the economic, political, social, and psychological problems that deadly diseases have caused in our past and the challenges we face currently and in the future. The importance of this study is emphasized by the author's last line in the text, "The history of disease will go on, despite once confident predictions of an end to epidemics in our times, and those who now wage the heroic struggle to find elusive cures to our new plagues may find that they have more to learn from the past than had once been thought."

Book Description

Bird Nests and Construction Behaviour provides a broad view of our current understanding of the biology of the nests, bowers, and tools made by birds. It illustrates how birds, among vertebrates, have more impressive and consistent building abilities than any other builders, excluding humans. However, birds seem to require no special building equipment and use quite uncomplicated behavior. The book raises general issues in the field of behavioral ecology, including the costs of reproduction, sexual selection, and the organization and complexity of behavior. This volume was written for students and researchers of animal behavior, behavioral ecology, and ornithology, it will nevertheless make fascinating reading for architects and engineers interested in understanding how structures are created by animals.

Bird Nests and Construction Behaviour. (Ornithological Literature). (book review): An article from: Wilson Bulletin

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Bird Nests and Construction Behaviour. (Ornithological Literature). (book review): An article from: Wilson Bulletin
Sara R. Morris
Manufacturer: Wilson Ornithological Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

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Book Description

This digital document is an article from Wilson Bulletin, published by Wilson Ornithological Society on December 1, 2001. The length of the article is 789 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Bird Nests and Construction Behaviour. (Ornithological Literature). (book review)
Author: Sara R. Morris
Publication: Wilson Bulletin (Refereed)
Date: December 1, 2001
Publisher: Wilson Ornithological Society
Volume: 113 Issue: 4 Page: 468(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

This volume presents a series of lectures given at the Winter School in Fluid Dynamics held in Paseky, Czech Republic in December 1993. Including original research and important new results, it contains a detailed investigation of some methods used towards the proof of global regularity for the Navier-Stokes equations. It also explores new formulations of the free-boundary in the dynamics of viscous fluids, and different methods for conservation laws in several space dimensions and related numerical schemes. The final contribution examines the existence and stability of non-isothermal compressible fluids and their relation with incompressible models.

Customer Reviews:

Pervasively amazing.......2005-11-11

Billiards at Half-Past Nine is an encompassing view of post-war Germany, both in the First World War and the Second. It chronicles the lives of the Faehmel family, and is quite challenging with its multitude of internal monologues. It only occurs in the span of one day, but this single day is enough.

We start with Robert Faehmel, a prosperous second-generation architect. We can already see in the beginning that he is not unlike a machine: his life is set like a clock. Every single day he works for only an hour, but there is little disparity, little uniqueness in his schedule. One could easily dismiss him as one who has an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but later on, one sees that this is only Robert's facade: he is trying to forgo of his guilt-laden and tragic past by offering himself no time to think about it.

This guilt-laden and tragic past comes from Nazism and Nazi Germany. Euphemized by Boll as 'the host of the Beast,' this is what mars the lives of the Faehmel family. The young ones who do not take this are battered and tortured, while those who do take it become strangers to even their own family. Robert did not take it, and he was whipped in the back with barbed wire, bloodied, and was to be executed if not for the help of friends. His brother took it, and such was the powerful psychological re-education of the Nazis that his brother was the one who told on his family - his brother was the one who wanted their family imprisoned. He became 'the husk of a child,' from the words of Robert's father, Heinrich.

The different lives of the Faehmel family are delved into with this book, and each one of them carries emotional and psychological scars from the past war. Some scars belong to Robert, who could never accept his country turning his back on him, some on his relatives, some on his friends, and in the end Boll reveals that no one got out of the wars unscathed. Not Germany. Especially not Germany.

Not one of Boll's best efforts, but still worth reading........2002-01-15

Heinrich Boll, Billiards at Half Past Nine (Signet, 1962)

Heinrich Boll was a brilliant mystery writer. Moreover, he was capable of writing mysteries unlike anything seen before, mysteries that turned the genre on its head. He was also capable of expanding the mystery genre so that it not only bordered on, but crossed over into, literary fiction. Unfortunately, at one point Boll allowed the mystery to slide into the background and started to concentrate on the literary side of things. This leads to the inevitable question for the reader: what does a mystery novel look like when the mystery is absent, or at least so far in the background as to be unnoticeable for most of the
novel?

Billiards at Half Past Nine is your answer. While there are elements of mystery within the novel, the focus is less on what's going on around the characters than the characters themselves. This is not, in itself, a bad thing; the characters upon whom the focus rests, all of whom are members of the Faehmel dynasty of architects, are interesting enough, and it would take conscious effort to make the first half of twentieth-century German history boring in any way. We are shown that period of time through the eyes of various members of the Faehmel family in a series of recollections leading up to Heinrich Faehmel's eightieth birthday party in 1958. And were that the basis of the novel, it would have been a good, solid piece of literature; ultimately forgettable, but good.

Boll felt the need to add something else to it, and it is there that the mystery comes into play. In the opening scenes, Heinrich's son Robert, the present scion of the Faehmel dynasty, tells his maid that, while he is playing Billiards at a local hotel, he is only to be disturbed by certain people. Most of them are family, or other members of his business; there is one name, though, that stands out, because no one knows who this Schrella character is, or why Robert Faehmel considers him on a plane of import with the others. This part of the book is where it is lacking; one gets the feeling that Boll felt it necessary to impart complications into a novel that doesn't require them.

While it's a worthwhile read within the context of Boll's complete works, it's not a place for a novice to begn an exploration of one of Germany's finest novelists. The Lost Honor of Katherina Blum and The Train Was on Time are much better jumping-off points. ** 1/2

Gripping panorama of German life.......2001-06-13

This work, in my opinion Boll's greatest, takes place duirng a single day in the life of Robert Faemel. He is an architect and ex-soldier who since WWII has turned inward, relying on routine to get him through the days. As the story unfolds, the reaader learns of the difficult and tragic events in his life that have led Robert to seek escape from the world, and ultimately gives hope that even these darknesses can be overcome.

Through his memories and those of his family, the book paints a remarkable panoramic picture of German life from ~1920 through 1960. The book really presents 3 generations of a German family and their experiences through this harrowing period. It shows both the dark side of postwar Germany, where many ex-Nazis had risen to positions of power and influence, as well as the lonely lights of human goodness and decency that remained throughout the dark period of the Nazis rise to power and the second world war.

As always, Boll's character's are expertly drawn and powerfully human. The storytelling can be difficult, requiring attention to keep up with the flashbacks and change in narrators. But it is absolutely worth the effort, as reading it will be a powerful experience that will stay with you.

The precise symbolisim of breakfast........2000-05-09

Heinrich Boll describes Robert Faehmel as a man who is percieved by his peers as armour-like and unflinching. Slowly, you get to watch the man disintigrate and further on -- rebuild. At half past nine everday, mid-morning, our hero "locks" himself into a room and begins the endless tirade of billiards with the bell-boy of a local hotel. Does he describe the game at all that he has? Only the conversation. Does the character brag about his skill on the felt? Only to tell you that he does it everyday at Half-past Nine. I truly felt that I was reading the journal of someone who was coming to copes with a serious case of P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), and you can't but help but be unnerved sometimes by the descriptions, illucidating how badly Boll was running when he wrote this. It's a very un-german approach to writing and it's most likely the reason why he was given the Nobel Prize.

Some of this work makes me feel like it's the unknown life of the ficticous Kaiser Souze. Some of this work seems a little bit on the cusp of 'needs editing'. It's a dark read, but one worth pondering.

A chilling post-war masterpiece.......1998-12-07

Through Robert Faehmel,the subject of Boell's stark description of life in post-war Germany, the modern reader can truly feel the same sense of unsettlement and social insight. Boell depicts a society where former Nazis, barely unfit to be tried at Nurenberg, now rule over Germany's biggest cities as mayors and serve in the modern beaureacracy. Faehmel is a man who can not survive here without his own rigid regime and almost stereotypic German precision in order to escape his fate in the present and his decisions and losses in the past. In "Billiards at Half-Past Nine," brought to the Engish reader by Pulitzer Prize winning translator, Leila Vennewitz, Heinrich Boell, Germany's conscience and master story teller, presents perhaps his greatest work.

Billiards at Half-Past Nine: A Post-War German Novel

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Billiards at Half-Past Nine

Billiards at Half-Past Nine: A Post-War German Novel
Heinrich (Boell) Boll
Manufacturer: McGraw Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000H4RVS8

Customer Reviews:

Billiards at Half-Past Nine.......2006-11-14

Robert Faehmel, strongly antiwar and antitotallitarian, had fled from the Nazis during their rise, had lost his wife and watched his mother lose her mind amid the horror of their time. He nevertheless became commander of retreating German forces which senselessly destroyed an abbey - the greatest of his father's architectural accomplishments. In an effort to retain his sanity, Robert Faehmel now lives a rigorously scheduled life; his daily ritual includes a game of billiards at the local hotel each morning at half-pat nine. The interruption of this routine by an old schoolmate and former Nazi who has become a power in German reconstruction triggers a conflict both absorbing and profound.
--- from book's back cover

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Billiards at Half Past Nine
Heinrich Boll
Manufacturer: Avon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Mass Market Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000JR7AJ8

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Billiards at Half Past Nine
Heinrich Boll
Manufacturer: Bard Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000J67CFG

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Billiards at Half Past Nine
Boll Heinrich
Manufacturer: Signet
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000NYEK3Q

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Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Heinrich Boll
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000NZTPJO

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Billiards at Half-Past Nine
Heinrich BOLL
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000I1UDMG

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Billiards At Half Past Nine
Heinrch Boll
Manufacturer: McGraw-Hill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000NTE9MI

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Billiards at Half Past Nine
Boll Heinrich
Manufacturer: Signet
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Billiards & Pool | Individual Sports | Sports | Subjects | Books
ASIN: B000NV5WJK

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Billiards at Half Past Nine
Heinrich Boll
Manufacturer: John Calder
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000WBCDNE

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