Book Kook

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” 
― Primo Levi

"Nsala of Wala in the Nsongo District (ABIR Concession)". The original description says that Nsala sits "with the hand and foot of his little girl of five years old -- all that remained of a cannibal feast by armed rubber sentries. The sentries killed his wife, his daughter, and a son, cutting up the bodies, cooking and eating them." The "rubber sentries" refer to the ABIR militia. The image has been published on several websites with the caption "A father stares at the hands of his five year-old daughter, which were severed as a punishment for having harvested too little caoutchouc/rubber".

Sado Island - "Zeami (Motokiyo) was the Shakespeare of Japan." - pg 223

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

In a Europe confidently entering the industrial age, brimming with the sense of power given it by the railroad and the oceangoing steamship, there now arose a new type of hero: the African explorer. To those who had lives in Africa for millennia, of course, "there was nothing to discover, we were here all the time," as a future African statesman would put it. But to nineteenth-century Europeans, celebrating an explorer for "discovering" some new corner of Africa was, psychologically, a prelude to feeling that the continent was theirs for the taking. - pg. 27 

When a child is born in Japan, the umbilical cord is saved and carefully stored, creating a dry fragile relic - a personal piece of archaeology - that soothsayers and psychics muse over on special occasions. Umbilical cords contain a certain visceral magic in Japan, and as I looked out across the bay from my hotel window, out to the Bridge of Heaven, it hit me in a surge of recognition: I was looking out at the lifeline itself, the connection between god and earth. I was looking at the umbilical cord of Japan. - pg. 164