Book Review: In the Wake of the Jomon, by Jon Turk

Overall, this was very an enjoyable book. It felt like I sat down for a beer with the author. It wasn't the literary piece that Sara Hall put forth. It had a more casual, less polished feel to it, quite like a nice chat where your friend is catching you up on a great trip and managing to educate you at the same time.

The book follows the author's two tandem journeys. On one hand, he explores the scientific community's attempts at uncovering the migration patterns of early man, specifically the passage from Asia to the Americas. At the same time, he takes us on his physical journey from the northern tip of Japan, through the Kuril Islands, along the coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula and across part of the Bering Sea to Alaska.

There is an intimate quality to his storytelling. He admits to having to manage his strong emotions at times, and to having to deal with the boredom of a repetitive activity- punctuated with life-threatening situations only nature could provide. He questions that very nature of wanderlust, wondering why there are fringe, lunatic risk-takers built into the fabric of society- people who, for all ages, have historically put everything on the line for adventure's sake. The answers he came up with are intelligently formed (he has a scientific background, while being a beatnik of sorts) and yet inspiring and fun to read and muse over. Jon, if you ever come to Boulder, I'll buy you a beer!

His enthusiasm translates the same way: sometimes he repeats the points he wants you to take away, lest you miss them, rather than trusting you to figure it out. Sometimes that annoyed me, but it was a 3,000 mile trip, so I'm sure he found his thought patterns repeating themselves more than once during that time. Besides, sometimes my friends and I dwell on epiphanies and repeat ourselves while gabbing, too. By the end of the book, I felt like we were friends.

The downside to this is that he ends the book abruptly. I have to wonder what caused him to abandon his storyline with so little closure. He references future adventures a number of times, and I know he has more books out, so maybe it was his attempt at hooking the reader into immediately starting his next book out of a desire to see the story continue. It's tempting...

Web presence: Jon has a website and email he posts in the book and invites his readers to contact him. I really like that. It continues my sense of familiarity and camaraderie that grew during the course of the book. I think I'll email him later this week. If I get a response, I'll post it.