Finding North, George Michelsen Foy
Finding North, George Michelsen Foy
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Finding North
How Navigation Makes Us Human

Author: George Michelsen Foy

Narrator: Tom Zingarelli

Unabridged: 7 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/10/2016

Synopsis

In 1844, George Michelsen Foy's great-great grandfather, captain of a Norwegian cargo ship, perished at sea after getting lost in a snowstorm. Foy decides to unravel the mystery surrounding Halvor Michelsen's death—and the roots of his own obsession with navigation—by re-creating his ancestor's trip using only period instruments.

Beforehand, he meets a colorful cast of characters to learn whether men really have better directional skills than women; how cells, eels, and spaceships navigate; and how tragedy results from GPS glitches. He interviews a cabby who has memorized every street in London, sails on a Haitian cargo sloop, and visits the site of a secret navigational cult in Greece.

At the heart of Foy's story is this fact: navigation and the brain's memory centers are inextricably linked. As Foy unravels the secret behind Halvor's death, he also discovers why forsaking our navigation skills in favor of GPS may lead not only to Alzheimer's and other diseases of memory, but to losing a key part of what makes us human.

About George Michelsen Foy

George Michelsen Foy is the author of Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence and twelve critically acclaimed novels. He was a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship in fiction, and his articles, reviews, and stories have been published by Rolling Stone, the Boston Globe, Harper's, the New York Times, and Men's Journal, among other publications. He teaches creative writing at New York University and is married with two children.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lisa on August 01, 2016

I won Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human by George Michelsen Foy from Goodreads. Part fascinating research, part memoir, part rollicking adventure, George Michelsen Foy's book, Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human, is a must read for anyone who enjoys seafaring adventure and human s......more

Goodreads review by Arthur on August 09, 2020

This book was not what I was expecting. It was part science. Mostly memoir. Part mystery. I did enjoy the book but it at times felt quite meandering. Which maybe is the point as the book is about navigation and much of it deals with how we find our way when we are lost. There are sections of the book......more

Goodreads review by Honza on January 31, 2024

The premise is good and the author broadly educated, but, more than his political asides (denouncing Thatcher's permission for franchises to set up shop in London is almost bizarre, and rankly entitled, to boot - don't let young people live so I can have my quaint, poor memories!) bothered me, his h......more

Goodreads review by Jerry on January 17, 2020

quotes and follows E. M. Forster rule that there are two plots, a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. In the case of this book the author goes on a journey to find the death place of of an ancestor died in 1844 in a shipwreck. On the journey, which takes him to a spot in the Atlant......more

Goodreads review by Isaac on September 30, 2018

Foy is a talented writer. However, he is far too interested in telling his own story to give much space to anything not directly tied to his experiences. In doing so, what could have been an interesting book on navigation and how it makes us human read much more as a memoir which I slogged through b......more

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