Tristan Gooley

There was a talk on his book just walking distance from my home. While I missed the event, it made me aware of the book. Come to learn, it was not a local author but a globetrotting walker who has walked from Edinburgh to London and over days with natives in some Asian wilds. Gooley's years of experience coalesces celestial navigation, geological clues reaching back to the Ice Age, animal behavior in sight and sound, trees pushed back by the harsher Northern weather, and more. Even for show more someone just interested in a walk of a few miles or curious about the regularity of the moon, this book holds a wealth of details applicable to ones on backyard, especially the backyards of North America and England on both sides of the upper Atlantic. show less

Terrible twaddle. Mr. Gooley has a very self-congratulatory tone which gives the feel that you are being talked down to throughout. I got to page 84 and had only found out that I can notice where the wind is coming from. Not a compass direction though, just "from the direction of the church on the hill." I couldn't tie down how this would help me get to a particular destination. I don't disagree with his premise that we have lost our connection with Nature and sure forcing yourself to notice show more what is around you will build new neural pathways but I don't think it needs to be built up in the way it is being crafted here. show less

Tristan Gooley’s How to Read a Tree is an absolute treat for nature lovers. It’s packed with fascinating insights into how trees communicate with their environment, from the bark and branches to the leaves and roots. Gooley has a knack for making you see what’s been in front of you all along, but with fresh eyes and a whole new appreciation.

This isn’t a book you read once and forget about—it’s one to keep coming back to. There’s so much information that you’ll find yourself show more revisiting chapters to refresh on the tricks he teaches, like spotting patterns in tree growth or reading the clues left by their surroundings.

If you’ve ever paused to wonder about the life of a tree, or if you just enjoy learning about nature in a hands-on way, this book will make your walks in the woods a lot more interesting! show less

I'm someone who spends a lot of time outdoors, and I really liked the central idea of this book, persuading us to look at the landscape in a purposive way, asking ourselves why that hill or that tree is in that place and that shape, and what information we can derive from that about where we are in relation to the earth and its weather, what the history of that particular landscape might be, and how the things we see relate to each other. It's a little bit like the way people used to do show more "natural history" 70 or 80 years ago (remember "Romany of the BBC"?), but with more of a practical hard edge: Gooley teaches something he calls "natural navigation", the art of finding your way about just using the information of your senses, without any useful tools like maps, compasses and GPS, and a lot of what he tells us to look out for here is related to that kind of activity.

Although the book is arranged in a slightly haphazard way, it has a good, comprehensive index, and would probably work quite well to refer to in real situations. But a lot of the more detailed information in the book is specific to what you might see in southern England (Sussex), so you would need to do quite some mutatis mutandis if you have the misfortune not to live around there.

What undermined the pleasure of reading this book for me was the constant irritation of being in contact with Gooley's "professional instructor" voice. He comes across as the sort of person the trainees would cook and eat on the third day of the survival course - a man with a suitably didactic anecdote for every occasion, and an exotic experience to trump every one of yours. Maybe he's not at all like that in real life, but on the printed page he's a bit hard to put up with. show less