cover image Spirit Walker

Spirit Walker

Hank Wesselman, Henry B. Wesselman. Bantam Books, $21.95 (383pp) ISBN 978-0-553-09976-8

While living on the flank of an active Hawaiian volcano between 1985 and 1989, anthropologist Wesselman reports, he had a series of visionary experiences. Projected 5000 years into the future, into the consciousness of a Hawaiian kahuna, or shamanic healer, named Nainoa, Wesselman presumably learned firsthand that Western civilization had been destroyed by a sudden rise in the ocean level. Through his paranormal interactions with Nainoa across the millennia, Wesselman has adventures in the spirit world and also watches as a band of Hawaiian natives who survived the cataclysm sail to the former California coast to rediscover the lost, devastated continent of North America. Fans of Carlos Castaneda's books may relate to these detailed premonitory visions, fleshed out with observations of Hawaiian shamanism. Wesselman lectures on shamanism and witchcraft at Sierra College in California. QPB main selection. (July)