Alert!The Book Lounge has released its list of 2009’s must-have reads – a terrific, considered collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and cookbooks that features many works of SA Lit (all shown above).
There Was This Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile by Antjie Krog, Nosisi Mpolweni, Kopano Ratele Book homepage EAN: 9781869141660 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
The book can be downloaded from the South African Council of Churches website (save paper?). Read an excerpt from Eddie Makue’s preface to the book below:
From Climate Change: A Challenge to the Churches in South Africa It is with gratitude, excitement and expectation that we make this book available. Throughout the decades of our existence, the South African Council of Churches, in a responsible and pro-active manner, strive to provide theological leadership regarding the immense challenges that contemporary societies face. The publication of this book bears testimony to our efforts to live faithfully to this calling. A Christian response entails that we, as followers of Christ, act priestly, prophetically and also in a royalservant manner. This document indeed offers a Christian – and therefore a priestly, prophetic and royalservant – response to the immense challenges of climate change that we have to deal with. In order to live in a Christian way in the world we need to live with priestly love and pay attention to what is going on around us. The famous North American theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, argues that the first step in faithful Christian living is to pay attention to what is going on around us. Climate change requires our attention. We need to pay attention. As those who adhere to an ethos of justice, peace and the integrity of creation, we pay attention to the plight of our natural environment as well. So, priestly Christian living is to pay attention and to show compassion. This affectionate and caring attention is an expression of love.
With the hugely-anticipated United Nations Conference on Climate Change to be held in Copenhagen in December this year – a conference that has become the subject of hopes and fears of literally millions – hot talk around global warming is increasingly bubbling up (to mix a metaphor or three).
This past Sunday, five big eco articles appeared in the SA papers – three in the Sunday Independent alone. When the media move in concert on an issue it’s always a sight to behold. BOOK SA certainly noticed, and, in case you missed it, we present the stories here. Go on, get inside the greenhouse and get to know the issues:
Here is the good news on the climate front: the Europeans have ratcheted down their emissions targets, the Chinese are getting serious about solar power and energy efficiency, and Washington is lumbering towards a carbon cap.
These are steps towards the long-held goal: cutting global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. Such cuts would stabilise the thickness of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide blanket surrounding the planet at 450 parts per million (ppm) and, we’ve been told, ensure that the global average temperature increase would not exceed 2186C from 1990 levels.
At last, the wreck of the rainforests is being tackled. One of the key parts of the Copenhagen climate agreement which the international community will try to construct in December is a comprehensive treaty aiming to reduce deforestation rates in the developing countries by at least 50 percent by 2020.
Not before time. It has been 20 years since we woke up to the reality of large-scale rainforest loss: in the late 1980s, the terrible scale of destruction in regions such as the Brazilian Amazon, and later, in Indonesia and other areas, dawned on the world, but in the time since then, all we have been able to do, in effect, has been to wring our hands.
We’re going to drown in information about climate change in the prelude and aftermath of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.
In SA, most of the information we’ll likely receive will state as incontrovertible fact that our planet’s temperatures are on the rise and humans are responsible for this. Climate change scepticism doesn’t get much press here.
In what would be the largest habitat zone established in the US to protect a species from extinction, the federal government has proposed designating 519 398 square kilometres on the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears.
Officials said the designation is not likely to further slow the pace of oil and gas development, and it crucially would not impose any controls to slow the biggest threat to polar bears, the melting of sea ice as a result of climate change.
Illness will affect productivity and employment, which could slash the GDP.
Our country is reliant on our natural resources and wildlife to attract tourists, so loss of habitats and biodiversity will negatively affect the economy.
A study by the University of Cape Town, in collaboration with the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies and USAid, estimates that climate change will put about 3% of our GDP at risk.
Tourism is a major source of income for many countries – but the money comes at a price. Every year millions of tourists pollute the planet while trying to see distant places – from the planes they use to get to their destinations to the copious amounts of water they consume, the litter they leave laying around and the eco-sensitive areas they trample.
Co-authored by Jeremy Smith and Richard Hammond, Clean Breaks: 500 New Ways to See the World, is your guide to eco-friendly travel, teaching tourists how to keep green while seeing the world. Paul Ash from talked to Jeremy about the book:
Alert! Happy Heritage Day! A day that, as most know, has been hijacked by a marketing campaign and is now also firmly registered in many an SA consciousness as “National Braai Day”. But we aren’t going to say “Happy Braai Day”. We refuse.
That said, there are some pretty darn good braai books out there and, if you’re quick, you can pick one up for 30% off at Kalahari.net, which is having a big sale on SA books – including some pretty terrific SA Lit titles.
The sale lasts until Friday. We’ve compiled most of the SA sale books below. Get a-clickin’!
Thesen Islands: Rise with the Sun, Fish with the Tides and Rest with the Moon by Les Aupiais EAN: 9780980265132 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
Prickly Pears and Pomegranates: Local, Organic and Seasonal Food from the Plains of the Camdeboo by Marianne Palmer, Bernadette le Roux EAN: 9780980265149 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
A Touch of Rooibos: Over 100 delicious recipes from 14 of South Africa’s leading chefs by Rooibos Limited EAN: 9780620429962 Find this book with BOOK Finder!
To promote the 2009 Words on Water India – SA Literature Festival, the Sunday Independent dedicated its books pages this week to the fest’s Indian participants. BOOK SA will re-run the features each day leading up to the events on 12 and 13 September. Here, Jacob Dlamini profiles Ramachandra Guha, the historian, environmentalist, cricket writer and “argumentative Indian”:
IN The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen quotes poet Ram Mohun Roy's observation that the really dreadful thing about dying is that “others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back”.
Sen says Roy's poem has a particular resonance for India because Indians boast a culture of loquaciousness, founded on reasoning and scepticism, that goes back centuries.
Ramachandra Guha is a trained sociologist and one of India's foremost historians; a former Marxist who is not averse to using Marxist analytical tools in his scholarship; a proud Hindu who has no truck with Hindu bigots; a Brahmin who detests caste and everything it represents; an Indian who rejoices in India's diverse messiness – in fact, Guha is the archetypal argumentative Indian.
He embodies the scepticism and faith in reasoning that Sen sees as being central to India's argumentative traditions.
Guha is also an environmental activist and one of India's principal public intellectuals.
Jane Goodall’s new work, Hope for Animals and Their World, concerns her personal journey towards becoming spokesperson for our planet and tells the story of how she came to devoting her life to the care of its animal and plant life.
Here’s an excerpt for this week’s Sunday read (and if you click through, you’ll find a video interview with Goodall):
There was no television when I was young: I learned everything from books — and nature. My childhood dream was realized when I was invited to Kenya by a school friend. I set off when I was twenty-six years old, after working asa waitress to save the fare. I went by boat because it was cheapest, calling in at places I had read about such as Cape Town and Durban, and finally arriving in Mombasa. For me it was especially exciting to arrive at the Canary Islands — for Doctor Dolittle had been there, too! What adventure, back then, for a young woman traveling alone. Once I reached Kenya, my love of animals led me to Louis Leakey, who eventually entrusted me with the task of uncovering the secrets of the behavior of the animal most like us. (Quite extraordinary when you consider I had no degree and back then girls did not do that sort of thing!) That study of chimpanzees, in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park, has lasted for half a century and helped us understand, among other things, more about our own evolutionary history.
It has taught us that the similarities in biology and behavior between chimpanzees and humans are far greater than anyone had supposed. We are not, after all, the only beings with personalities, rational thought, and emotions. There is no sharp line dividing us from the chimpanzees and the other apes, and the differences that obviously exist are of degree, not of kind. This understanding gives us new respect not only for chimpanzees, but also for all the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet.
This has nothing to do with SA Lit, but we’re always glad to see a new article by David le Page. Here, he questions Eskom’s plans for underground coal gasification (UCG) wondering if what they are calling “clean coal technology” isn’t just “cleaner coal”, still with large amounts of pollutants.
ESKOM is very comfortable with generating power from coal, but like many of the world’s utilities, the parastatal is under ever- increasing pressure to use less coal and reduce its enormous contribution to global warming.
One of Eskom’s latest efforts to make coal cleaner is a pilot project for underground coal gasification (UCG) adjacent to the gigantic Majuba power station near Volksrust in Mpumalanga.
The idea behind UCG is that instead of first mining coal, processing it, then burning it to produce heat and electricity, you set it alight underground to produce a stream of gas that can be burned to produce electricity.
With the hugely-anticipated 
To promote the 
Jane Goodall’s new work, 
