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[Following is a volunteer review of "Walks of Life" by Doug Wheat.]

Walks of Life, by Doug Wheat, is an educational and informative book about getting out and enjoying nature. The author reminisces about the days when teachers were creators, instead of followers and could teach their students in the "university of the universe," as he likes to refer to the natural world. As a mother of home schooled children, I can definitely appreciate his views about real world teaching.

I could really feel Wheat's love and respect for nature through his emotional and poetic descriptions of the wild environments he has experienced. I appreciated the author's thoroughness on the wide variety of topics covered including geography, history, science, wildlife, weather, modes of transport, supplies and hazards. He also included maps, photos, stories, poetry, quotes and charts. This book really has everything and more for the keen nature enthusiast.

However, I did find multiple editing errors and felt that many of the sentences used were extremely long. By the time I had finished reading a lot of sentences, I had to go back and read the start of the sentence again. There were many sentences that included long lists that I felt could also have been shorter. Although Wheat was a science teacher and appears to believe in evolution, he also referred to god and other religious things throughout the book, although not excessively.

I learned some new words that I needed to look up at times and there were a few mild swear words used. I enjoyed discovering some new and interesting information throughout the book. My favourite fact was, "The water portion of our blood, the plasma, contains the same dissolved salts and elements—in the same proportions as ocean water does, evidence that when our distant ancestors left the sea, they didn’t really leave it behind. They brought it onto land inside them. The earth’s oceans flow in our arteries and veins."

I'm rating this book 3 out of 4 stars, as I felt the book could have been a bit shorter to help keep the reader's attention. It also needs some more editing, although the errors weren't overly distracting. Walks of Life would be a valuable field manual and an entertaining read for both the beginner adventurer and the expert alike. For the reader who prefers the indoors, there is much to learn from Wheat's book about many facets of our human lives and of our beautiful wild world.

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Walks of Life
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This book sounds like it’s full of wonderful information! Thanks for sharing an outstanding review! The outdoor adventurous nature of this book is very appealing and it doesn’t seem like the errors were overly distracting. Thanks again!

I love to go hiking, so I think I would thoroughly enjoy this book. Thanks for your wonderful review!

I find one of the hardest things to read is lists upon lists! Its unfortunate the author fell into that trap, however the information provided seems super interesting! Great review

What a great review! I've read a few on this book but you've raised some interesting content that others haven't.

That bit about the ocean has me feeling something profound. There's quite a bit of that to be found in nature, I guess, and it really does serve as an excellent teacher, so I'm glad this book exists.

I believe in the world we live in today.

Students being more and more conformed as little converts to a whole other way of learning, this author is bringing back a classical way of learning that anyone in their 20’s,30’s and above ages, always has the advantages of learning, especially the arts, mechanics, learning about cooking and what tool to take care of a home, photography and much more that our children of this generation are sadly missing out on.

This is a whole new era that even we have to get accustomed to. It is like surpendibitu to think a time like that,”when we went to school,” even existed anymore.

Excellent, way of bringing back what seems to be of old.