ISBN: 9780963810809 Year Added to Catalog: 2010 Book Format: Hardcover Book Art: A companion music CD (54 min, 38 seconds playing time) Dimensions: 6 line-art illustrations on part-opening pages Number of Pages: 304 pages, plus a 48-page, illustrated color insert depicting a book-within-a-book Book Publisher: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 Old ISBN: 304 Release Date: September 29, 2010 Web Product ID: 550
Including The Line, music inspired by the book, by Eric Maring
Laxer creates a half-human, half-ape protagonist, Emmanuel, a religious college freshman who is devastated when he discovers his engineered genetic makeup. Nothing in the Bible suggests that such a creature as he can be a Christian. Determined to help him escape his genetic and spiritual isolation, his bold girlfriend, Lucy, decides to write a scientifically correct Bible in which biology and spirituality intersect, while the two make their way from Seattle to Senegal to volunteer at a chimp sanctuary. Laxers modern allegory.... is funny, entertaining, informative, and accessible, a clever teaching story that gently raises crucial questions about religion, science, and how we treat not only apes but all of creation.
—, Booklist
The Monkey Bible is the story of Emmanuel, a young college-bound Christian man who suddenly has reason to suspect that his genetic make-up, and indeed the story of his creation, is not what he had thought it was. Dismayed and seemingly alienated from his church, Emmanuel journeys around the world in search of his genetic and spiritual origins, identity, and community.
The science behind the story is accurate, up-to-date, and accessible, and the reader comes to understand the biological creation story as the adventure unfolds. While The Monkey Bible can be seen as the latest chapter in the larger-than-life debate between Darwinists and creationists, the novel is respectful of both sides, and strives to provide a gentle supportive bridge across which people who disagree can communicate. Ultimately, The Monkey Bible is a timely and necessary plea to alter the stories by which we define ourselves as a way to protect the countless creatures on the great tree of life, upon which all human life depends.
The Monkey Bible is a compelling read and the potential audience extends well beyond those interested in biology, anthropology, wildlife conservation, mythology, and religion. Adults will enjoy this book and so will college students, whose fresh questions about their own origins will resonate with this novel.
Using The Monkey Bible as inspiration, songwriter Eric Maring has written a companion music CD which uses the varied notion of lines to echo the novel’s themes. The Line—at turns serious, light, joyous, exuberant, and brooding—praises our ability and need to explore our world and to ask questions, especially regarding our relationship to our planet, our religions, and ourselves.
Much of the novel is based on real world experience including virtual ecotourism (vEcotourism), and you can go on a live vEcotour by visiting http://www.vecotourism.org
"Human apes shall embrace the use of nuclear power, said UG, for it has excellent potential of reducing the potentially devastating carbon build-up in the atmosphere—but only if the nuclear power is generated off-planet. Humans must never ever generate nuclear power, fission or fusion or whatever, on earth or in earth’s orbit." -The Monkey Bible
Long ago, Mark Laxer's quest to understand The Bigger World landed him in the inner circle of a brilliant, sensitive, charismatic meditation teacher gone mad. After writing Take Me For A Ride and weathering a $30 million lawsuit, Laxer continued the quest by studying what it means to be human from a biological, anthropological, and mythological point of view. Laxer runs a storytelling gathering and a wildlife conservation organization. In 2004, he invented virtual ecotourism.
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