Mark your calendars for an event with Montana author Jon Turk on Wednesday, March 10th at 7pm.

Balancing between “logic and magic,” Turk attests to the innate powers of body, mind, and soul that are awakened when we immerse ourselves in “Wild Nature.”

—BOOKLIST (starred review)

A moving account worthy of shelving alongside Vladimir Arsenyev’s Dersu Uzala (1923), Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) and other explorations of native ways of life in the Far North.

—KIRKUS REVIEWS

THE RAVEN’S GIFT: A Scientist, a Shaman, and Their Remarkable Journey Through the Siberian Wilderness By Jon Turk

 Jon Turk is a PhD who has written and published 24 environmental and earth science textbooks.  He has also paddled around the Cape of Good Hope in a kayak, traversed the Northwest Passage and retraced the voyages of the ancient Jomon people from northern Japan around the North Pacific rim to Alaska.  However, the strangest journey Jon has ever taken—a journey as a man of science into the realm of the spiritual— is told in THE RAVEN’S GIFT. 

In 2000, in the remote Siberian village of Vyvenka, Jon Turk met an elderly woman named Moolynaut, a Koryak shaman and animist and learned about her voyages to the spirit world.  A year later, visiting her a second time, Jon fell and aggravated an old injury to his hip so badly that he was unable to walk.  Moolynaut performed a healing ritual involving the spirit of a great, black raven.  Despite Jon’s fears that the fall had broken the steel plate that holds his pelvis together, when the ritual was complete he was able to walk again without pain.  The man of science could find no rational scientific explanation for the healing and the experience changed his life, irrevocably altering his view of the connection between the different spheres of the natural world.  In an attempt to understand how Moolynaut had healed him, Jon sought understanding by skiing across the frigid tundra where Moolynaut was born and raised, camping frequently with isolated bands of migrating reindeer herders, recording stories of their lives and the animistic spirituality that informs their world view.  Filled with scenes of great natural beauty and informed by the spiritual questions he was asking, THE RAVEN’S GIFT is sure to become a classic of the nature shelf and will be embraced by readers interested in a spirituality outside the realm of most western understanding.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jon Turk, a Ph.D., has written and published 24 environmental and earth science text books. He is a world-class adventurer whose expeditions are backed by companies like The North Face and Prijon, the leading manufacturer of kayaks in this country for whom he serves as a national spokesman.

He is also a contributing editor for the online Adventure and Exploration Magazine. He currently alternates his time between Fernie, British Columbia and Darby, Montana.