Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who Mapped the World's Oceans
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.66 (978 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0062279351 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 384 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-01-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Barrie, he is married with two daughters.. After serving in the British Diplomatic Service, Barrie worked in the arts and as a law reform campaigner. David Barrie has sailed in many different parts of the world and made many long passages. The great-great-nephew of J. M
A heady mix of adventure, science, mathematics, and derring-do, Sextant is infused with a sense of wonder and discovery. In the tradition of Dava Sobel's Longitude comes this dramatic tale of invention and discovery—an eloquent elegy to one of the most important navigational instruments ever created, and to the daring mariners who used it to explore, conquer, and map the world.Barrie takes readers straight to the helm of some of history's most important expeditions, interweaving these heroic tales with the account of his own transatlantic passage as a young man. At once a dramatic history of maritime endeavor and a love letter to the sea and sky, it is timeless storytelling at its best.
“As lovingly and painstakingly constructed as the navigators’ one irreplaceable talisman, David Barrie’s exquisite book is a hymn to a now-vanishing feature of maritime life, a finely-chased reminder of just how much we all owe to that one small piece of apparatus” (SIMON WINCHESTER, author of the New York Times bestselling The Men Who United the States and The Professor and the Madman)“Beneath the book’s calm surface churns a melancholic message about how the comfort of technology — symbolized by the sextant’s almighty antagonist, GPS — has turned our gaze away from the stars.” (Entertainment Weekly)“Even for armchair adventurers with no sea legs to speak of, Barrie’s Sextant is a compelling read.” (Shelf Awareness)
"Good book" according to Good Picks. Got it for my dad whos an old fisherman. He was anxious to read it.. Rob Hardy said The Gadget to Guide Us, Before GPS. When I was at the Naval Academy nearly a half century ago, one of the courses, and it was a hard one, was Celestial Navigation, the use of a sextant, star almanacs, and charts to find out where a ship was located. From what I hear, midshipmen no longer study such things; it is easier, faster, and less liable to error to ask GPS where the ship is, and it is better to have the middies studying things they will actually use. David Barrie, a British sailor of ya. Tried and true navigation Unlike the good ole days, sailors now rely primarily on GPS to pinpoint their position at sea, as opposed to more traditional methods like star charting and using the sextant. Thankfully there is a revived interest in traditional boat navigation and boatbuilding, which you can learn about in SS Rabl's Boatbuilding in Your Own Backyard.The Sextant reads like an autobiography, novel, and historical account all at once! Dangerous and wonderful adventures of fa