Ishmael

Rating:
Summary: Who's the Master, Who's the Beast?
Review: Many would say this book, too long, not suspenseful. I would argue they missed the whole theme of the book. This book isn't meant to be solely suspenseful. It's a book that makes you see things different, fresh way. I never understood the importance of an animals habitat and their lifestyles. This may sound odd to all of a sudden begin thinking about an alternate point of view now, but that's what this book does. The sign that reads "Without man gone is there hope for gorilla?" in Ishmael's room is eventually transposed by the narrator to read, "Without gorilla gone is there hope for man?" I can't help but wonder if what Daniel Quinn is trying to point out, could actually be true?
Are we really trying build a paradise but instead destroying the innocent animals in our world. To conquer and build this paradise are the images placed in our minds, but we have begun to fail in such a task that we continue doing more bad than good. We don't understand the way of living, as Daneil Quinn said, but we seem to want to find a way; we are eager to find a way. These creatures seem to sit back and laugh at us while we are destroying instead of creating a paradise.

Rating:
Summary: Monkey gone to Heaven
Review: I love this book. I just finished it a couple of days ago. Already I have purchased a second copy and given both away with instructions for them to be passed on. If one of my copies doesn't come your way in the next week you should go buy it, read it, and then give it to your best friend. This book did a great balancing act with hope and despair, eventually leaving me slightly more weighted on hopes side. If this isn't a true story and Daniel Quinn didn't actually meet "Ishmael" teacher and learn these things then I have to ask, "How did he come up with this, it's amazing." I really hope time will tell us how important this story is. I was pleased to see that it has only been out for a little more than 10 years. Big changes take time and this book could very well instigate a big change in our world, it has in mine.

Rating:
Summary: Importan but Boring
Review: Daniel did a really good job of stating the obvious over and over again. I am sure that we all know that we are damaging the earth but, who wants to face the truth. The truth is that someday our planet is going to be overcrowded and peple are going to be starving to death. However, the truth hurts that is why nobody pays any attention to what we are doing. This book also ticked me off a little bit. The book made it seem as if agricultural was the worst knowledge humans have aquired. Guns do not kill people, people kill people. I know it stated that is was not pointing the finger right at agriculture but, it it gave a very small impression that it did. Of course, because I am an agricultural major that is probably the reason I feel that way.
I also did not like the setting's that Daniel picked. The most exciting thing that happend was when Ishmael was talking at the carnival. The book could have been better if the conversation envoled a little more suspense. The whole book was a simple,long and boring conversation. That was a pretty lame idea. I also thought the idea of a gorrila being that smart and being able to talk was pretty stupied.

I did like the slap in the face Daniel gave me. I know it is hard to face the truth but, we have to be reminded of it every now and again. His story was catchy and disapointing at the same time. But, obviously the story was good or else he would have not made all of that money.

Rating:
Summary: It sounds good, It must be true
Review: When I first began to read this book I was drawn away because the story starts off really slow, but chapter two picks up the pace and begins to suck you in. I think thats why I liked the book so much because one moment it's boring, and then something will grab your thought and next thing you know, you have read three chapters.
Ishmael talks alot about evolution and religion through out the book. I found myself kind of frustrated because I do not study the bible, but at the same time the book made me interested in the story of the bible. "Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is a powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world with out becoming criminals."(Pg.159Ishmael)
After reading Ishmael I found myself thinking alot about the treatment of animals, and how people should do more to protect them and their environments. It also made me think about how people are so quickly to believe in these stories of religion, and if you do not believe, you are looked down on.
Ishmael makes you step out of the cave and explore the light.

Rating:
Summary: Selfhood pronounced a delusion & New territory
Review: I find that Ishmael is bold in challenging the human's predefined justification and giving us the opportunity to rethink our perspective on life. I wondered if it was actually possible for a gorilla to display such knowledge, and how the gorilla came to acquire these insights. Well I guess it was due to observation and through experiences, for instance, when he was told that he was not Goliath(As he felt his awareness of selfhood had been pronounced a delusion, that very moment may have triggered or developed his approach and intuition). I think on many occasions throughout history man has been blinded to believe what somebody else wants for us to believe. Contented from the soothing of a fictional story because the truth of the matter just might be out of their cognizance! I liked the overall concept in the beginning of the story when it displays the question-"With Man Gone, Will There Be Hope For Gorilla?" For man in our ignorance have this perception of the world, flattering ourselves with the thought that everything within the world wouldn't otherwise function properly without our existence. I love how the book concludes, after Ishmael has pasted, the narrator discovers the other side of the sign which reads-"With Gorilla Gone, Will There Be Hope For Man?" For it was actually a gorilla and not mankind whom pointed out to the narrator this manor of unfamiliar territory, along with new methods, styles, and technique's on ways of comprehending! If you're that stupid to precede in life depending on others opinions, but if you're brave enough, read the book for yourself and evaluate a conclusion or you're own explanation!

Rating:
Summary: Psychic Gorilla Dung
Review: A psychic gorilla lectures a lame former hippie (psychically, natch) on how to save the world. His message? The earth is on the brink of environmental collapse because the evil white people have forgotten that the world does not belong to them. The prose is leaden, the characters (all two of them) two-dimensional. But that's not the primary reason this book ...; after all, this is not really a work of fiction but a sociopolitical screed. The fictional framework frees the author from such superfluities as footnotes and references -- after all, the eponymous Ishmael has such _gravitas,_ we are meant to credulously lap up every word he says just as the book's narrator does. That's apparently just what most new-age idiots who would read this book in the first place do... witness all the five-star reviews. But for those with an open mind I recommend a couple of correctives: _The Skeptical Environmentalist_ by Bjorn Lomborg, plus Jared Diamond's fantastic _Guns, Germs and Steel._ _Those_ books have footnotes.

Rating:
Summary: Recommended Reading
Review: I sometimes feel as though the world, in the condition it is today, is like an ocean liner headed full-speed for an iceberg. Not everyone sees it and the people who can do something about it don't see it, and even if they did, would there be time to slow or alter the course of such massive momentum? And does anyone even know how? (And is the iceberg really there, or is it a mirage?) Daniel Quinn's book gives one theory of how things came to be as they are and why we are on a collision course with doom if we don't alter our way of thinking about the world and our relationship to it. There are no easy answers to such a huge predicament, and Quinn doesn't try to provide any. In this book he just tries to convince us that there is a problem. (After all, isn't it said that the first step in solving a problem is admitting that you have one?)

Rating:
Summary: Good Beginner's Book for a Cultural Wake-Up Call
Review: For those who are in the very early stages of waking up from the great patriarchal nap, the simplicity of the book and its cleaver approach can be a good start. I've heard that a number of young people, especially men, find the book life altering. An excellent follow-up book with much more meat about "takers" (patriarchal) and "leaver" (matriarchal) cultures can be found in Leonard Shlain's The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. There are also a number of other excellent books on the subject as noted in many of the other reviews of this book.

One of the major problems with Quinn's ideas is that he doesn't know he is caught up in (taker) patriarchal "either/or" thinking. Don't we both give and take? Isn't it "both/and" thinking that we've been missing out on? The challenge at this point in time is to look at both cultural approaches, sort out what works and what doesn't, and combine them to create a new period. Quinn also appears quite confused when he refers to the "taker" group as "mother culture" when as Shlain and many others point out, it's a male dominant issue. Just look at who has all the power and wealth in the "taker" culture. It isn't mothers. Sure, people are "unconscious" of another way of living (which is what I think he means - the feminine being a symbol of the unconscious) but it was patriarchy that suppressed this knowledge.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Book About "Mother Culture" Raises Questions
Review: This book does a brilliant job at showing how we surrender to self-destruction, cynicism, and complacency by believing the lies that culture ("Mother Culture," he calls it) implants into us. Culture is a great humming machine that slowly drips her lies and mythologies into our bloodstream. By questioning the "story" we tell ourselves, Quinn does a good job of criticizing the excesses of the Takers, his term for post-agricultural man. However, many of his points seem flawed in oversimplification, historical inaccuracy, and faulty comparison. For example, he compares everything we learn from Mother Culture to the beliefs of Nazis. Surely, Mother Culture is more complex than that. Second, his solution for our self-destructive ways is for us to go back to our pre-agricultural days (when we were Leavers), a task that would entail the suppression of our creative (and destructive) urges. Third, Quinn hasn't sold me on his idea that man is just like all the other animals and therefore has no special place. Man is both higher and lower, more angelic and more demonic, truly exceptional and apart from the animals, contrary to Quinn. Fourth, I'm suspicious of anyone who says humans can turn back and recover some more "simple way of life," another utopia hustle. Fifth, I'm suspicious of anything that smacks of a 'noble savage myth.' Leavers, as he calls them, are somehow better than Takers. I suspect the Leavers were just as barbaric and bloodthirsty, if not worse, than us. Sixth, Quinn's 'solution' would result in mass starvation. Who decides who starves at this point? Seventh, his assertion that 'savages had no prophets' seems like an unlikely oversimplification. Many so-called primitive cultures have had spiritual leaders or prophets, contrary to what he says on page 85. Eighth, he says God only became important when "neolithic white men showed up." Another falsity. In fact, all the major religions came out of a Semitic, dark-skinned people. Ninth, contrary to his claim that Leavers had no prophets, many primitive tribes, or Leavers, were just as guilty of warring with competing tribes of different gods as are the Takers. Tenth, he doesn't do a good sell of his 'moral relativism" on page 87 Case in point: there are universal values like courage that are embraced by all cultures. What culture values cowardice and betrayal? None. So perhaps there IS A RIGHT WAY TO LIVE. And finally, after making general truths about how we become captives to lies, he slowly but surely plants his own lies, half-truths, exaggerations, and oversimplifications and makes us captives to his propaganda. Thus he is guilty of creating the very kind of captivity he condemns.

In spite of these criticisms, please read this entertaining, readable book and learn several highly sophisticated brainwashing techniques.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: Daniel Quinn has an idea. He sees homo sapiens as on the verge of self-destruction and traces the major behavioral patterns bringing this about back to what is commonly referred to as the agricultural revolution. According to Quinn, we long supposed our species to have originated when writing originated some five thousand years ago, and continue to suppose "humanity" to have begun when what Quinn calls "totalitarian farming" began some ten thousand years ago, and this despite our now knowing that our ancestors diverged from other primates millions of years ago and became what we call homo sapiens two hundred thousand years ago. We dismiss the vast majority of human history as "pre-history" which is tantamount to "non-history." We do not ask much about how humans lived before the agricultural revolution, and when we do we almost always suppose that such poor creatures would have leaped at the chance to be like us. (Quinn's argument seems to me valuable whether or not we are as close to disaster as he believes. Heidegger traced similar behaviors back to Greece. Others trace them to the Industrial Revolution. Quinn places the Break at the Agricultural Revolution.)

"When the people of your culture encountered the hunter-gatherers of Africa and America, it was thought that these were people who had DEGENERATED from the natural, agricultural state, people who had LOST the arts they'd been born with. The Takers had no idea that they were looking at what they themselves had been before they became agriculturalists. As far as the Takers knew, there WAS no 'before.' Creation had occurred just a few thousand years ago, and Man the Agriculturalist had immediately set about the task of building civilization." ("Ishmael" p.201)

Quinn believes that tribes surrounding the first totalitarian farmers did their best to resist the new way of life, just as "primitive" tribes today try to resist the culture which I cannot call Western since Quinn lumps the East and West together as "Takers." Totalitarian farming, civilized human culture East and West for the past ten thousand years: this is Taker culture. The vast majority of human history/"prehistory" and various tribes scattered through the world today Quinn calls Leavers. Leavers can be hunters, gatherers, herders, even farmers on a small scale. Quinn points to organized hunting as a uniquely human characteristic uniting us with our distant ancestors. What Leavers do not do is produce more than they need, rapidly expand their population, impose their way on others, annihilate species that threaten crops, and otherwise engage in "totalitarian farming."

Leavers also do not work nearly as much as Takers. Quinn reads the story of Eden as an ancient Leaver Semitic myth about non-Semitic Takers, a myth handed down to uncomprehending Taker Jews and to uncomprehending Taker people like us. The forbidden wisdom was the arrogance of deciding what animals should live or die. Similarly Cain was the Takers killing the Leavers (Abel), although God preferred Abel's gift. Whether Quinn is right about the authors of these stories is a rather minor point, though one liable to draw a lot of attention. More important is this: Quinn sees virtually all the troubles of what we ordinarily call human history as the results of overcrowding. He doesn't think overcrowding is new. He thinks it has just gotten exponentially worse, and - like the frog in the slowly heating water - we are close to letting ourselves be boiled. Quinn blames war, crime, slavery, insanity, poverty, laborious work, suicide, drug addiction and quite a few other things on over-crowding and on the outlook that has caused the overcrowding. There are areas where I have serious doubts about Quinn's claims, places where I find him wrong or overly speculative. I intend to discuss some of these. But I want to stress first that I think Quinn should be read.

Of course, he IS being read. His books are best-sellers, prominently displayed in the windows of the decreasing number of massive book store chains. But he is not read enough or seriously enough. His books are deceptively easy to flip through in a couple of hours, and they are (horror of horrors) not even simple treatises but NOVELS. In addition, Quinn seems bent on encouraging those who might be tempted to see him as a bit New-Agey, fruitcakey, self-enraptured, with hopes of leading a highly devoted cult. Quinn of course writes clearly and explicitly against such movements, but risks projecting that image all the same. Quinn cannot be accused of obscurantism, but I would be very much surprised if he is not (wrongly) accused of simplicity. And Quinn certainly projects the image of one who will never admit to being mistaken on any points. The Teachers in his books are characters who can accept praise but never correction, and who seem to accept assistance from their disciples only after they themselves have died.