Jon Turk, author of The Raven’s Gift, a life-altering vision of the ties between the natural and spiritual worlds, will be in Cranbrook for a special public reading from his newly-published book 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Cranbrook Public Library in the Manual Training Room.

Turk, an author, scientist and academic at the University of Colorado, now resides in Fernie as well as Darby, Montana and has written 24 environmental and earth science textbooks.

He is also a world-class adventurer who has travelled the globe and a contributing editor to the online Adventure and Exploration Magazine.

In 2000 in a remote Siberian village he met an elderly woman and shaman who told him about her visits to the spirit world. A year later on a second visit to the shaman, he fell and aggravated an old injury to his hip that left him unable to walk.

The shaman, Moolynaut, performed a healing ritual involving the spirit of a great black raven. Despite Turk’s fears that the fall had broken a steel plate that held his pelvis together, when the ritual was completed he was able to walk again without pain.

This shocked the man of science, who could see no rational scientific explanation for what had happened and the spiritual healing changed his life and altered his view of the connections between the natural and the spiritual worlds.

In order to better understand what had happened to him, Turk travelled across the Siberian tundra with Moolynaut and camped frequently with migrating reindeer herders and listened to their stories of how they survived in such a harsh environment.

The book is filled with adventure and scenes of great natural beauty as Turk begins a new “education” in the ways of a more primitive world, but a world filled with animistic wisdom in one of the most isolated areas of the planet.

The Raven’s Gift is sure to become a classic on anyone’s nature shelf and embraced by those interested in spirituality outside most Western understanding.