David Diaz has given us an excellent overview (his own word for this book) of military tracking. Diaz took an exciting three day patrol by a very well disciplined US Special Forces team chasing infiltrators bent on contaminating a water source, and broke it into 4 or 5 sections. He wrote an excellent introduction. He inserted between the story's sections, explanations of the actions of the team, especially its 11 year veteran tracker, Badilla. He added a few excellent chapters on important aspects of tracking like: time since "Chase" passed, vegetation pointers, use of animal and insect species in the area, putrefaction times, examples of changes in feces both in terms of diet and of time. There is an excellent introduction to building your own tracking laboratory. He concludes with the military type detailed report on the mission described.
The book is well written and entertaining. The details on aspects of tracking are very good and remarkably complete,. Diaz covers everything from being very fit, (various cardiovascular plus weight lifting pushups, situps, knee-bends, dips, chin-ups, and pullups, 3 - 4 times per week) to being well versed in the outdoor details of your area, to not smoking (it destroys the critical sensitivity of your sense of smell.).
This is not a textbook on tracking. I think it would be an excellent book to give to novice trackers, as required reading in a tracking course, as motivation for intermediate trackers, and as entertainment for advanced trackers.
While the cover of this book indicates it can be used for missing persons, and the book does gives occasional clues as to civilian tracking, if you are truly interested in looking for missing children, hunters, climbers, hikers, back packers, skiers, old folks who have wandered off, I would strongly suggest The National Association for Search and Rescue's text "Search is an Emergency: Text for Managing the Search Function" edited by Lavalla, Stoffel, Wade and Brady (last known 1995). It was produced and published by The Emergency Response Institute, commissioned by a sole source contract from The National Park Service, Albright Training Center, Grand Canyon, AZ. It has an instructor's guide also. Two more good, more recent and more available books, on civilian tracking are "Fundamentals of Search and Rescue" from NASAR (National Association for Search and Rescue) and "Wilderness Search and Rescue" by Tim Setnicka.
The recommended reading list given us by Diaz is excellent and much more recent than "Search is an Emergency." Surprisingly, none of the above three books are included. I particularly liked his inclusion of the Tom Brown material, both the basic "Nature Observation and Tracking" and the very advanced "The Science and Art of Tracking." Several of the books Diaz lists are excellent for tracking of animals.
Put into the above perspective, Diaz's "Tracking Humans" is an excellent and welcome addition to the literature. A good buy.
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Brady L.
great for someone trying to learn a new skill
Reviewed in Canada on March 16, 2021