A provocative look at the vital connection between human beings, the natural world and meaningful knowledge.
While tracking a lion with a Samburu headman and then, later, eluding human assailants who may be tracking him, Jon Turk experiences people at their best and worst. As the tracker and the tracked, Jon reveals how the stories we tell each other, and the stories spinning in our heads, can be moulded into innovation, love and co-operation — or harnessed to launch armies. Seeking escape from the confusion we create for ourselves and our neighbours with our think-too-much-know-it-all brains, Jon finds liberation within a natural world that spins no fiction.
Set in a high-adventure narrative on the unforgiving savannah, Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu explores the aboriginal wisdoms that endowed our Stone Age ancestors with the power to survive – and how, since then, myth, art, music, dance, and ceremony have often been hijacked and distorted within our urban, scientific, oil-soaked world.
Language
Place of publication
Target group
Interest Age: From 16 years
Product notice
Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
ISBN-13
978-1-77160-473-4 (9781771604734)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Jon Turk grew up on the shores of a wooded lake in Connecticut, attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and then Brown University. He earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1971 and was nominated by National Geographic as one of the Top Ten Adventurers of the Year in 2012. Between these bookends, he co-authored the first college-level environmental science textbook in North America, followed by more than 30 additional texts in environmental, physical, and Earth sciences. At the same time, Jon kayaked around Cape Horn and across the North Pacific from Japan to Alaska, mountain biked across the northern Gobi in Mongolia, made first climbing ascents of big walls on Baffin Island and first ski descents in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzia, and in 2011 circumnavigated Ellesmere Island. He has published numerous magazine articles and four adventure books: Cold Oceans, In the Wake of the Jomon, The Raven's Gift, and Crocodiles and Ice. During extended travel in northeast Siberia, his worldview was altered by Moolynaut, a Siberian shaman. Jon splits his time between Darby, Montana (near the southwestern boundary of Montana and Idaho, along the Continental Divide), and Fernie, British Columbia. For more information, see jonturk.net.
