Reader Comments

With Covid raging in the fall of 2021, I have had to cancel many in-person speaking gigs. I miss the give and take of questions and discussion of my ideas. So… I open this chat room for discussion about any book or about any of my ideas. Send me your questions, ideas, thoughts, compliments, criticisms through an email (jon@jonturk.net), or through my contact page and I will post them here, and encourage discussion.

Dave Costello: March 1, 2022: It’s a beautiful and frightening story—told with humor, insight, and humility. You turned the literary mirror on yourself, asked hard questions, and answered them honestly. That takes guts, and also forces readers to look at themselves. I found myself stopping often while reading, to look up and then say to my wife, “Wow. Now, listen to this:”. I learned a lot by reading it, and now I’m trying to find those hard answers for myself. I’m hoping I find them after few more trail runs around the local beaver ponds.

Lisa Poe in Wild About Books: Feb 23, 2022:  Jon’s books should be read with a highlighter. There are many good lines worth noting. Jon’s travels are conduits to spirituality as I believe all adventures are. Jon’s writing makes you love the earth and its people, makes you believe in humanity and makes you want to care for it all. And then it takes a reality turn and makes you question our ability to care for the earth and its people. Jon takes a hard look at the climate crisis. His book is a plea for everyone to wake up and take responsibility for our selfish use of the earth and its resources. I’m only half way through as I write this, so I’m not sure of the final trajectory of this book, but my friend Carol says it is a wonderful ending and Jon’s best book yet. Like John Phillips, Jon is one to tell stories on himself as he stumbles through the harsh terrain of Africa with his new friends and guides. So many sentences in Jon’s book are not just a statement to move a story, but a life lesson worth contemplating.

“My fear and my weaponry are not only unnecessary; my fear has been creating an emotional and situational environment that might create danger and require fear.”

I highly recommend John and Jon’s books, and not just because I know them; they are both really good books.

Dave Brabec: Jan 26, 2022: Jon Turk takes us on an adventure leading to an understanding of why culture played such a key role into developing society. Dancing, music and ultimately, friendship become the basis of our species survival, and in fact, maybe what saves us again. Turk is adapt at bridging the past and the present into an explanation of ourselves as a species and as individuals. A great read.

Mike Atzert: Jan 17, 2022: I felt like Jon Turk personally read this, his final book, to me. While I read, I heard his voice in my head intone time and again to pay close intention to the story but be wary of the storyteller. Jon advised us to take care dear reader, to assay the story and scrutinize the storyteller. Do not be led astray. We humans need stories as we need air to breathe. They galvanize us. They salve us. We tell stories to express who we are. We listen to stories that may inspire us to be our better selves, but they also may motivate us to hate, to strip our fellow sapiens of their humanity. Jon repeats this message in multiples. He slips this theme into his own story from manifold angles. Jon is a man who knows from which he speaks having experienced and insinuated himself into many different native cultures, comprehending with great depth the "songlines" of indigenous peoples, peoples from around the globe who often have been oppressed by supposed more "civilized" entities after being categorized as "other." These oppressors enlist the support of the disenfranchised against the "other" through the use of story, the negative blade of the double-edged sword of story.

Jon has dived deep into wilderness and wildness in his decades of exploration and expeditioning. He has witnessed at close hand the incremental diminishing of the wild. Jon yells from the proverbial rooftop that we must beware of the evolution of this calamitous story. The future of Earth itself is in peril because of charismatic, yet nefarious storytellers and their Trojan horse-esque stories. What once was thought hyperbole and scaremongering becomes truer with each iceberg calving in the Arctic and Antarctic. Jon advises don't run away cowed by fear, but be constructively fearful. Stand firm, be totally aware and totally concentrate on the real. Jon teaches and encourages us to be so through his story of the Samburu.

"Tracking Lions..." is a wonderfully unsettling book. The story is as warm as the subtext is chilling. It is a volume worth absorbing to its fullest depth, inhaling heartily as you would the air in the deep wild.

Jan 10, 2022: Susan Fletcher: I can’t thank you enough for writing this book.
My biggest take away is how our stories bog us down, wear us out, and keep us from living in the now.

Jan 9, 2022: Jill Pangman: I can relate to the landscape and can picture myself there  and I can also relate to the subjects you are querying, pondering, and discussing. and some new tangents too. I’m loving the links you are making to why humans as a species have become so dominant given their physical weakness, and given the decline of Homo sapiens between 700,000 and 90,0000 years ago. Also the link with storytelling and its importance in cultures then as now, and the pros and cons of that… and the stories we tell ourselves as cultures. I wanted to congratulate you on another well written book and your incredible accomplishments as  a Homo sapiens who chose not to fit into a path laid out for you by your family and you stepped into a life of adventure but also incredible productivity amidst doing much of what you loved and what excited you. and also in the midst of all that having a family, etc .

Jan 3, 2022: Diana Kushner: I have been meaning to write to you for a long time now, to tell you how much I enjoyed your book - from the first page onwards. You have given me a gift of new ways of thinking about and interpreting this crazy time we live in. And also the gift of an incredible story well told. In some ways, the adventure story part of it is bittersweet, because we have also committed ourselves to leading a life that does not entail emitting so much carbon into the sky. With that comes a commitment to exploring closer to home, and those journeys closer to home don't seem to peck at 'the meaning of life' as much as do journeys further away from one's comfort zone. Response From Jon: I have spent many decades flying around in airplanes.  I am guilty of racking up a huge carbon footprint on my own quest for whatever I have been looking for. It’s been a grand life and I have enjoyed all these decades of travel and learned so much from my adventures and from the people I have visited. But I just can’t — anymore — in good conscience — jump on an airplane and burn up a lot of fuel to have fun, or to become ‘enlightened’.  It’s such an obvious contradiction to ‘want’ more to ‘seek enlightenment.’  We all go there to some extent, I guess it’s just the balance.

Dec 31, 2021: Steve King: I could not put this book down, which was only a problem when the captain turned off the seatbelt sign and the crew encouraged us to get off the plane. I would have, in that, moment have been happy to be sent back to my place of origin so I could continue the amazing journey of historic and current human evolution offered to us all in this book.
In fact that is one of the remarkable elements of this book, Jon Turk weaves a compelling narrative that includes the origin of homo sapiens, the development of storytelling, painting and myths as core elements of human cultural evolution. He is living with the Samburu people of Kenya, he is tracking lions on certain days, dancing with Russian tourist who provided their own vodka, vaulting his body straight up into the air at a Samburu wedding celebration, hiking  up a nearby small mountain to stay fit for one of his stateside passions of mountain biking, helping recover a wayward camel and trying make sense of why a person nearby was shot in the leg just down the from the village where is he stationed at “the motel at the end of the world” as he describes it. He shines a light on how dictators, despots and tyrants have created myths to galvanize tribal divisions that have led to January 6, 2021 and numerous horrific clashes and murders among people over the past centuries around the planet.

Jon Turk has suggested that this may be his last book which I very much hope will not be the case. In some ways this may be a magnum opus for him as he beautifully integrates parts of his rather extraordinary books about his adventures around the planet into the text of this journey. I admire the tempo and juxtaposition of his thoughts on how and why humans have lost much of their connection to wilderness and our rapidly degrading global environment with his daily experiences with and among the Samburu. The chapter titles move the reader back and forth in time, place, space and cultures, including “The Birth of Mythology”, “We Become a Story Telling people”, “A Lion Eats a Cow” “Climbing Mt. Sabache-Ololokwe”, “Mythologies We Love and Kill For” and “The Warriors”.

I would say there is no one quite like Jon, he is a Ph.D. chemist, a performance artist, a humble, yet gifted writer who has had some astonishing wilderness experiences following his passion for life, oceans, mountains, cultures, adventure and the smell of the earth beneath his feet. As he mentions in his preface, he was finishing his first manuscript for his collaborative book, “Ecology, Pollution, Environment” on Earth day in 1970, in many ways ahead of his time seeking to help us awaken to what humans were doing to our nests, our fragile planet. Fast forward, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day in April 2020 in the midst of the global pandemic, he was completing this amazing book. There is an arc, a purpose and a number of messages and questions for us all to ponder and Turk gently but directly asks the reader to step back and think and perhaps as he so elegantly also states, to stop thinking so much with our very large brains and embrace the magic that exists within and around us. He judiciously shares highly relevant quotes and data from the likes of Carl Safina, E.O. Wilson (may he rest in peace), Shakespeare, Kiona Smith, the bible, Yuval Noah Harari, Joseph Campbell, Peter Wohlleben and Robert Sapolsky among other thinkers, writers, environmentalist and story tellers.

The book includes close to a dozen pages of color photographs that introduce us to the Samburu people who grow fond of Jon, which is a recurring experience for him as he has wandered to remote places on this planet. These images help us get to “know” the people that he walked, talked, hiked, laughed, danced and learned with and from. Jon is an astute observer of human and animal nature, which reminds us while we are separate we are also interconnected and always have been. The people who we “meet” visually include Tina Ramme, who invited him to come to Samburu country to learn about lions, these people and their culture. The situation and place that Tina invited Jon to visit becomes quite dangerous as the story unfolds, and that I will leave for the reader to experience. To his credit, Jon has provided support to this community after his visit, as the pandemic has made a drought stricken region even more challenging as the flow of Africa tourism has dwindled to trickle over the past few years. His support to some of the people in the community where lived is not surprising, based on how embraces the people who embrace him.

It is not necessary to read many of his other books, “In The Wake of Jomon: Stone Age Mariners and a Voyage Across the Pacific”, “The Ravens Gift”, “Crocodiles and Ice” in order to appreciate this book but I highly recommend that you do.

Dec 8, 2021: Leonardo Esch: Yes, you're right. "Every person can become a light of sanity." Great! Thinking about, I ask me if each person want to become a light of sanity... The potential exists, but until it becomes real it's a long way... Many people live but don't even realize life...

Dec 5, 2021: Steven Hanes: Finished your latest book last week. Bravo, I think it’s a good one. I know, because it sits with you after you are done with it, and in fact, several nights I did not sleep well after reading chunks of it. It’s disturbing for sure.

I found the early parts about human evolution to be very interesting and informative, and not so dry like when you read about it from archeologists or paleontologists. Since it’s not my field, I appreciated the simplified, intuitive, global view with some interjections about your myth theories, which I tend to agree with. It binds like-minded people now, so I’m sure it did way back when. And all cultures have their myths.

The descriptions of real-life in Africa today was also eye-opening. Americans, including me, are relatively ignorant about the continent in general and the wildly discrepant life styles within African countries – from bustling Westernized cities to people living in the bush not unlike their ancestors from 1000 years ago, apart from the Jeeps and AK-47s. And I didn’t realize how dependent the wild animals (and locals) are on tourism, something so completely wiped out by Covid-19.

The really disturbing parts include the descriptions of how we Americans and Western cultures are all part of the bigger problem – as you call it the Luxury Ladder. I didn’t sleep really well after that long diatribe about the fact that driving our cars, living in air-conditioned houses and offices is so directly contributing to starvation of people in the bush in Africa.

If there is a weak part (I am used to critiquing Grant Applications), it could be the liberal rant tone of some parts that include current political and culture-war problems in the US. While I totally agree with you and was happy to see that you and I think very much alike about the craziness happening here in the US, it might make the book a bit less well-received among broader audiences. Response from Jon: Yes, I did rant a little about modern politics. My editor cut some of my ranting out of the original manuscript, but allowed some to remain. I've had a few other comments/criticisms about that. Yes, I get it, and yes, I could have? should have? reined in a little???? But the Republican party has really gone rogue these days. And they really use storytelling to generate anger, which is an age old trick, and we should be aware of that.

Nov 27, 2021: John Royce: I received your book today. After dinner I did what I often do, opened the book to a random page to read one sentence. Kiwis in winter and “The Boy” desperate to survive. I then read your message and the preface. We leave for Yosemite next Saturday; I’ll be replacing the book I already tucked into my backpack with yours.
Thank you, in advance, for caring so much. If only we could start a caring revolution. I’ll go to my grave trying. WeNotMe.

Nov 22, 2021: Karen Seashore: My favorite chapter, hands down, was “Lost Camel.” It was perfect, a good blend of self realization (including the author’s humility which flows through the book and is very welcome), humor, characters, philosophy, place, and etc.
I liked the Luxury Ladder, loved the photos. The descriptions of your little camp, of the fairly mysterious Tina, of your own struggles with what was and wasn’t going on.
My mind jumped to Marley with the “don’t worry, be happy” so I was happy to be reminded it was Bobby McF. I liked it a lot that you had the order of the two lines wrong at first and correct them and therefore the order became meaningful and important. The bits of songs throughout are great, by the way.
You come across as intelligent, sincere, open to the world and nature.

Nov 8, 2021: Peter Stekel: Jon Turk. He’s a writer. An adventurer. Explorer. Historian. Whether it be on skis. Or in cold or frozen oceans in a sea kayak. Or also in mountains and snow and now, with this latest book, on African savannas and in deserts. Turk is a book writer, memorist, textbook and science writer. He’s also a seeker. Of visions. Truths. Of spirits and spirituality. A rational scientist chasing irrationality. Not searching for the meaning of life so much as examining that meaning. He’s looking to balance the scales between the rational mind and the story teller. The what is and the artist’s what can be.
These last two tug and pull in Turk’s latest book of wilderness exploration. And as it turns out, here is a book not so much about wilderness but a book focused on people’s behavior as they live within wilderness. And, as the title overtly declares - a book about myth. And covertly, tradition and story telling and how these elements explain where we are today in western culture with our solutions and our problems.
What Turk has to say is a mighty tug. He pulls it off masterfully, pulling the reader along on a journey as exciting as any of his cold ocean adventure writing. Tracking Lions, Myth, and Wilderness in Samburu is infused with a deep spirituality and derives from his always personal experience.
(This is a long review. The complete text is on my Amazon book page, under customer reviews. click here.)

Nov 1, 2021: Peter Williams: Slow reading this book, too much to think about and Google while reading.

Oct 30, 2021: Brenda Birrell: You’ve hit so many things I’ve tagged for discussion, so many things I feel are so important. This book Jon will certainly get people thinking and hopefully changing their ways. Maybe we all won’t quit flying but any step in the right direction is better then none. My hope is your book goes crazy that people listen that they talk and change however much they can. I grew up on a small farm we were pretty poor when I was young worked so hard. It was a good life. Simple. Family neighbours were huge part of our life. My parents did very well in later years but I have great memories of our life on the farm and often think would it be so bad if we lost our technology for some reason and went back to that simple life style. That’s not something I talk about to people.

Oct 23, 2021: Steve Mathes: Jon Turk has previously written vivid accounts of his extraordinary outdoor expeditions in the harshest environments: The Raven’s Gift, Crocodiles and Ice, and In the Wake of the Jomon. But Turk’s latest book is different. Like his earlier books, this last adventure is on the edge. It involves lions and local warriors with AK-47s, in a remote part of Kenya. But, unlike his earlier books, this book is more about Turk’s trained scientific observation of mankind and our relationship to our planet than it is about a dangerous time in Africa.
Turk has spent his life observing people and human nature as revealed by hunters and shamans, snow avalanches, and a magic mushroom voyage to meet the great raven. He has learned a lot. And this book is a springboard to tell Turk’s insights about humans and our environment, formed over the past fifty years while Turk literally faced death in the most dangerous places. If you want a most intimate picture of Turk’s far ranging and detailed insights, this book is for you. And you’ll get a page turning adventure story as well.