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 fog bank 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.

The brilliant new novel by the author of The Restraint of Beasts

"J.M. Coetzee's vision goes to the nerve center of being."—Nadine Gordimer J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2017 will be available January 2018. A shattering pair of novellas in the tradition of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Dusklands probes the links between the powerful and the powerless. "Vietnam Project" is narrated by a researcher investigating the effectiveness of United States propaganda and psychological warfare in Vietnam. The question of power is also explored in "The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee," the story of an eighteenth-century Boer frontiersman who vows revenge on the Hottentot natives because they have failed to treat him with the respect that he thinks a white man deserves. With striking intensity, J. M. Coetzee penetrates the twilight land of obsession, charting the nature on colonization as it seeks, in 1970 as in 1760, to absorb the wilds into the Western dusklands.

There is no better place in the world than a library. Especially a library that kids create! A million stories high? Sure. Bathtubs? Absolutely. A full-service sundae bar? Of course. Everything is possible in this library--just like in books! Author Lindsay Leslie puts the reader in charge as the architect of a fantastical library in this imaginative picture book celebrating libraries and the joys of reading.

With suspense and humor, this wary and unadventurous book uses the five senses to try and figure out what kind of story might be on its pages. Does it hear spooky wails from a ghost story? Can it see a mysterious something peeking around a corner? Is that the dizzy feeling of zero gravity it senses? Might that be the stinky smell of animals in nature it detects? Could it be tasting the saltiness of a story on the high seas? The reader and book navigate the book’s contents together, becoming friends as the book becomes braver with every page turn. This multilayered book incorporates the five senses, multiple literary genres, and various book parts, with the relationship between book and reader bringing everything together.

Nature lovers and poetry fans alike will be drawn to this lyrical picture book depicting how Carolina wrens build a nest for their young. This is the bark, snippets of twine, spidery rootlets, and needles of pine that shape the nest that Wren built. In the rhyming style of “The House That Jack Built,” this poem about the care and specificity that Carolina wrens put into building a nest is at once tender and true to life. Papa and Mama Wren gather treasures of the forest, from soft moss for a lining to snakeskin for warding off predators. Randi Sonenshine’s lilting stanzas, woven with accurate and unexpected details about Carolina wrens, and Anne Hunter’s gentle, inviting illustrations reveal the mysterious lives of these birds and impart an appreciation for the wonder of the life cycles around us. Back matter includes a glossary and additional interesting facts about wrens.

"In The Explorers, New York Times bestselling author Martin Dugard shares the rich saga of the Burton and Speke expedition. To better understand their motivations and ultimate success, Dugard guides readers through the seven vital traits that Burton and Speke, as well as many of history's legendary explorers, called upon to see their impossible journeys through to the end: curiosity, hope, passion, courage, independence, self-discipline, and perseverance."--www.Amazon.com.

From the first people to leave Africa to the first to leave the planet, the urge to explore the unknown has driven human progress. Explorers tells the story of humanity's explorations, taking the reader into the lives of some of the most intrepid people ever known. Throughout history, exploration has arisen from a wide range of impulses, from trade and the search for lands to colonize, to scientific curiosity and missionary zeal. This book tells the story of explorers of every type, from those chasing glory to those seeking enlightenment. In its pages, readers will meet some of history's most famous trail blazers-people whose courage opened frontiers, turned voids into maps, forged nations, connected cultures, and added to humankind's knowledge of the world by leaps and bounds. Each life is captured in context, by considering the knowledge of the world in which the explorers lived, the factors that gave rise to their expeditions, and the technology available to them at the time. Their discoveries, and the consequences, are also considered in depth, and highlighted with beautiful maps, photographs, and illustrations. The tales of the explorers' assistants and companions are woven into the overall story, along with an examination of the qualities that made the them drop everything in pursuit of discovery.

A family backpacks into the mountains and enjoys several days of camping.

It is called zero point energy, and it really exists - a state of energy contained in all matter everywhere, and thus all but unlimited. Nobody has ever found a way to tap into it, however - until one scientist discovers a way. Or at least he thinks he has. The problem is, his machines also cause great earthquakes, even fissures in tectonic plates. One machine is buried deep underground; the other is submerged in a vast ocean trench. If Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala and the rest of the NUMA team aren't able to find and destroy them, and soon, the world will be on the threshold of a new era of earth tremors and unchecked volcanism.