Full moon

According to Astronomy Picture of the Day, tonight’s full moon will be the biggest of the year. If the sky is clear, enjoy!

The Green Bible

A couple of months ago, Harper Collins published what it calls The Green Bible, an edition of the New Revised Standard Version in which more than a thousand passages that deal with the earth — like these — are printed in green.

“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being.”
Job 12:7-10

“You shall not pollute the land in which you live…you shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I also dwell; for I the Lord dwell among the Israelites.”
Numbers 35:33-34

It’s a nice idea, the book looks attractively produced, and Harper Collins has lined up some impressive support from the likes of Bishop Tutu and the Sierra Club.

On the other hand, Harper doesn’t say much about the paper it’s printed on — a very serious matter to a lot of environmentalists. The paper is recycled, they say, but according to a press kit that means “10% recycled.” There’s no apparent reference to postconsumer content, and I don’t see anything about certification by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), which is the gold standard. In the video on the website, a Harper executive talks about the binding and paper being “recyclable,” which is an extremely low standard.

This was also not the first “green” Bible. Thomas Nelson published one last year, and that one was FSC-certified.

Through the Dark Continent by Henry M. Stanley

Through the Dark Continent is a book I wish I’d had a chance to read before I reviewed Tim Butcher’s Blood River. Butcher’s book recounts his adventures crossing the Congo in the footsteps of Stanley, and although I’d read Stanley’s How I Found Livingstone, I hadn’t read his book on the Congo.

Through the Dark Continent is a substantial work: 800 pages long in the two-volume Dover edition. Like other Dover books, this one is a photoreproduction of a 19th century original, and the antique type and engravings add to the pleasure of the text. Having set type by hand in the past, I noticed the increase in typographical errors in the second volume as the typesetters grew weary (and perhaps, according to stereotype, drunk).

The first volume is devoted to Stanley’s explorations around the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, including a visit to the emperor of Uganda. It is not until the second volume that he sets out on the Congo River, which he refers to throughout as the Livingstone — a name that didn’t stick.

Several times during his journey, Stanley found villages decorated with skulls that he was puzzled to identify. Some he believed were human, left over from cannibal feasts, but others he was told belonged to an ape called the “soko.” Sometimes he thought he heard this creature: “The grey parrots with crimson tails here also first began to abound, and the hoarse growl of the fierce and shy ‘soko’ (gorilla?) was first heard” (p. 60).

In a village called Kampunzu (p. 111) he found “two rows of skulls, ten feet apart, running along the entire length of the village, imbedded about two inches deep in the ground, the ‘cerebral hemispheres’ uppermost, bleached, and glistening white from weather.” The skulls looked human to him, though with “unusually low and retreating” frontal bones. He asked the villagers what they were.

“They replied, ‘sokos’ — chimpanzees (?).”

By now Stanley had apparently decided that chimpanzees were what the locals meant by sokos — but if these skulls were large enough to be mistaken for human, then they were probably not those of chimpanzees. He pressed for a description.

“It is about the size of this boy,” pointing to Mabruki, my gun-bearer, who was 4 feet 10 inches in height. “He walks like a man, and goes about with a stick, with which he beats the trees in the forest, and makes hideous noises. The Nyama eat our bananas, and we hunt them, kill them, and eat them.”

The description would seem to fit a large chimp or a small gorilla — but when Stanley took two soko skulls to England and showed them to Professor Huxley (presumably Thomas Henry Huxley, the Darwinian) he was told they were human.

Perhaps Huxley was right, or perhaps he was not familiar enough with gorillas to tell the difference. It was only about twenty years before that Paul du Chaillu, author of the neglected Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, was apparently the first Western to see gorillas in the wild.

Discouraged workers

Rather than add to the chorus of despair over the current financial crisis, I’ve been trying to feature the encouraging words of people like John Bogle and Warren Buffett. But the phenomenon of discouraged workers, which the Times noted on December 5, deserves more attention. In short, 6% unemployment doesn’t mean that 94% of workers are working. The situation is much worse.

According to the Labor Department, the number of unemployed workers rose by 251,000 in November. But the number of people who were outside of the labor force — that is, neither working nor looking for work — rose by much more: 637,000. These people aren’t counted as unemployed in the government’s statistics, because they are not looking for work. Many of them, presumably, have stopped looking for work because they didn’t think they could find a good job.

If you take a broader measure — one that tries to account for them — you see a darker picture of the labor market. The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s. The share of women with jobs has fallen almost two percentage points from the peak it reached in 2000; at no other point in the past 50 years has the share of employed women has fallen so much from its peak.

New reviews on Africa and the Caribbean

More of my book reviews on African and Caribbean topics are now available on this site (thanks, Jenn!)

Africa
Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala
Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild
GraceLand by Chris Abani
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
Instruments of Darkness by Robert Wilson
The Seventh Heaven by Naguib Mahfouz
Zarafa by Michael Allin

Caribbean
Quitting America by Randall Robinson