A pleasant and quick read about paying more attention to nature, mostly through observing one's own garden. As other reviewers have noted, only a portA pleasant and quick read about paying more attention to nature, mostly through observing one's own garden. As other reviewers have noted, only a portion of the book is dedicated to weather....more
A pleasant and easy-to-read overview of the art of natural navigation. Tristan Gooley has got about a dozen books out on the topic, I think others areA pleasant and easy-to-read overview of the art of natural navigation. Tristan Gooley has got about a dozen books out on the topic, I think others are much more practical in terms of how-to. This was more anecdotes and trivia woven together with a few thoughts on why we should still bother to think about where the sun is in the sky, where the wind is coming from, etc. I finally learned that winds are named from the direction they are coming from, not the direction they are blowing, which is something I'd wondered for a long time but never bothered google. Now I know!...more
This was.... not a book for me. I read half of it. I can imagine how exciting this must've been in the 1970s, but now it reads like the ur-text of eveThis was.... not a book for me. I read half of it. I can imagine how exciting this must've been in the 1970s, but now it reads like the ur-text of every first person essay on the internet by a young person who is just enthralled by their own ability to notice details about the world, and haven't yet met a detail they can't apply to themselves somehow. "Aren't I just a quirky marvel of observational ability?" This, compounded with the constant shallow thoughts about god and the mystery of creation and the flatness of every other human that appeared (only one person here is allowed to notice deeply and have deep thoughts about the world I guess) and etc drove me up a wall. I disliked this book so much I continued reading just to try and figure out what was going on with me that I had such a negative reaction. For it's not a badly written book (maybe an occasionally over-written book), and it's not mean or petty book, and it takes place in Virginia. I wouldn't argue with anyone who loves this book, my response is totally subjective, but, nope nope nope, did not want to spend another week trying to get through it.
Treating something like dirt is an idiom meaning to look down upon or treat with contempt, but if you treat dirt like dirt, ha, joke's on you, for theTreating something like dirt is an idiom meaning to look down upon or treat with contempt, but if you treat dirt like dirt, ha, joke's on you, for the soil will have its revenge. It make take decades (or centuries if you have particularly tolerant dirt) but eventually it will fail to grow your crops in the quantities you need, it will take off with the rain and leave you with some dead rocky plains and rivers full of debris, or in the case of the United States, kick up catastrophic dust storms. So, better to treat your dirt like the precious commodity it is, one that is replenished only over a long span of geologic time, and absolutely necessary to support all life on the planet.
Before I began this book, I wanted to be someone interested in soil science and the history of agriculture more than I actually was interested in these things. But David R. Montgomery is an extremely engaging writer and this book was a pleasure to get through. It serves as a good introduction to the science of soil, the role of agriculture and soil depletion in the rise and fall of a number of ancient civilizations, and more current environmental challenges related to industrial agricultural practices. As often happens with these types of books, Montgomery occasionally veers a little out of his areas of expertise to make some big claims about culture or economics or whatever, in ways that will probably annoy specialists in those fields. But he is not nearly as egregious in this as some authors of non-fiction for general audiences, and he packs an incredible amount of knowledge into less than 250 pages. Highly recommended. ...more
