Customer Rating: 
Summary: One of a series of Guides by Brown
Comment: I first read this book several years ago, along with his first book "The Tracker." I was impressed enough to travel by plane, bus and truck to his class in New Jersey. Yep, New Jersey, home the largest wooded area in the U.S.
Tom says as a kid he was trained by an Apache Scout and Shaman whom he calls "Grandfather." We spent a week sleeping in a barn on the hay, going barefoot is really cold weather and cooking outside on a large communal grate. Lecture sessions were held in a 100-year old barn and tracking (or dirt time as Tom calls it) was in various woods and fields. This was one of the texts and we had a meal or two using it as a guide-deep fried clover blossoms as I remember, using cattail blossoms as flour. It was very good.
Tom still has classes in NJ. When I left I was certain, as I still am today, that I could survive in the woods or anywhere if necessary.
Get this book along with "The Tracker," for a complete view of Tom's story.
Tom was also technical advisor on the Tommy Lee Jones movie "Tracker," and the knife used in the production is available from Brown. Enjoy, Learn.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: more tall tales, where's the info?
Comment: I was not impressed. there is very little useful information in this book, mostly just a bunch of tall tales written to impress inner city folks who have never gotten a chance to experience the outdoors. Don't waste your time or money with this book. Field guide to mammal tracking in north america by jim halfpenny is the book you want. Allan a macfarlan is another author i recommend looking into, he has written about the same subject but has more detail.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good book, but not my first recommendation of his books
Comment: a good book about how to really see things in nature, not just the obvious. it also goes into some of the basic and more technical aspects of tracking people and animals.
however, i felt that it was to much in the middle of basic tracking and very technical tracking. personally if you want the basics of tracking i would buy his book entitled "Tom Brown's Field Guide to Nature and Survival for Children". this lines out basic tracking skills very well so that a child can understand, but i have found it very helpful in my practices. And if you want very technical tracking advise i would get his "Science and Art of Tracking" book.
And pretty much all of his books go through some nature observation guide. this one just has a lot more excercises for practicing it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A mind-opening book about nature and the outdoors
Comment: I've read this book twice, and both times I've learned (and re-learned) to see and feel and experience more when I go outdoors, go camping, or take wilderness trips.
The book teaches a lot of good stuff about tracking, but its best material, I think, is its section on nature observation: on learning to have a wider range of vision, to see more peripherally, to be quieter, and to be more aware of one's surroundings.
"The tragedy in life is not what men suffer, but what they miss," Tom Brown quotes Thomas Carlyle as saying, and this book is all about helping you not to miss so much.
The book contains great advice and tips on building sweat lodges (to cleanse your body and mind and increase your awareness), on getting more out of your outdoor experiences,on getting closer to wild animals, and on letting the outdoors free life from its tensions.
The book is also full of little exercises designed to heighten your awareness.
My favorite is one where you use sticks to frame a single square foot of outdoor ground. Then you stare at it from a standing position, making note of everything within it: little rocks, a plant, a hole here or there. Then you kneel down and study it from that level: all of a sudden you can see mouse pellets, tiny bugs, and seed husks around the holes on the ground. Then you get down on your stomach and put your face right up to it: suddenly you can see where beetles have nibbled the plant's leaves, you can see the footprints of mice, and you can see the holes are deep, and wider than you'd thought. Then, after about an hour of fascinated scrutiny, you stand up, and the square foot, and all the ground around it seems to pop and buckle, as the realization of how much was all around begins to hit you. The ground seems writhing with life and interesting things, and you can never look around you the same way again.
It's very cool.
I highly recommend this book. Its lists of various scat and tracks are a bit long for casual cover-to-cover reading, but as a guidebook its information is thorough and fairly complete. Read it, learn from it, and add new depth to the way you view the world.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A valuable guide to outer and inner awareness
Comment: This is an unusual book in which hard core tracking tips are blended with instructions on cultivation of the inner silence. As opposed to other stories about tracking which border the domain of fiction (e.g., "The Way of the Scout"), Brown gives us in this Field Guide practical advice on reading animal tracks, constructing shelters etc. The tips on "Nature Observation" in this field guide are unsurpassed by any other tracking book I know. TB provides us with priceless descriptions of what happens the moment we enter the forest - that is, how the alarm signal spreads from the birds to mammals and how long it takes for it to subside. The forest he is talking about is a living entity, where everything is connected and where one can plug into the circuits of the information flow by learning to listen to the sounds, by studying the terrain and the wind and by knowing how to camouflage and mask one's smell. The book provides useful info on various types of walking/stalking in the woods. Finally, there is deep reverence for nature something which occurs when one has learnt to be silent amidst the whispering trees (no mean trick for the Westerner who tends to function through the head). Tom Brown has learnt the inner silence tricks from his Apache teacher ("the Grandfather") and trackers might find this book useful for learning more about Native American attitudes toward nature. A similar approach to nature is encountered in some of Paul Rezendes' books (which i also recommend). In short, this book will be useful to those who are interested in approaching nature on its own terms. It will inspire the beginners in tracking and complement knowledge of hard core SAR UTS trackers (:)
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