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Summary: Experience It.
Review: Simply amazing. You must read it to experience it. A life-changing book that you will read over and over again, and pass along to a number of friends.
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Summary: My world has changed
Review: I read the first of Daniel Quinn's books, Ishmael, over five years ago. Ever since, I have not been the same person. The ideas found within these pages are the stepping stones to reversing the damage done by thousands of years of exploitation. If there is a voice in your head saying, "Why am I doing what I am doing?" read this book. You may find great things within.
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Summary: Wake up
Review: The point of a book like Ishmael is to show peoplet that life can be carried out in so many ways. That life can be fun without work. It does not state what is, it tries to tell the truth in the hope that you will find what the truth for you is. If you can wake up to the modern world, trust me i have done it, it is one of the most beautiful experiences in the world. It has to be, for when you see the world with truth you have gone to heaven, you have become perfect. I am not exagerating, you see that your culture has flaws, and you reacted to them as perfectly well. It is not your fault you have been lied to. Read this book if you have a feeling that something inside you is dead. it will show you what is wrong
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Summary: Environmental Student's Review
Review: I chose to read this book for an Environmental class unaware of it's contents and suprisingly enjoyed it. It reverses everything we have been taught from day one.
"It's about the meaning of the world, about divine intensions in the world, and about human destiny."
This quote from the book sums up the overall meaning and you will look at life and everyday situations in a new light forever.
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Summary: A Change for the Human Race
Review: We the students at Green Hope, of sixth period, thoroughly enjoyed the book Ishmael. It made some really good points which has had a greater significance on our thinking about how we live. The ideas mentioned in the novel were things that were obvious when someone sits down to think about them but when the facts are stated in a different way(as in the book), they struck us as, "that's so true". As the book went on, we didn't realize how dependent the narrator had become on Ishmael. What we also didn't realize was how much we also depend on Ishmael to teach us, too!
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Summary: No New Age blather here!
Review: A reader from Dallas recently commented that he thought ISHMAEL was worthless new age garbage. ISHMAEL is not New Age spirituality. If it were, it wouldn't be used in History, Science, Anthropology, Philosophy, etc. courses all over the country. ISHMAEL is a synthesis of science and history and is down-to-earth. In fact, Daniel Quinn did not even offer the subtitle: "An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit." It was the publisher who wanted that. I question whether anyone who reads this book and calls it new age, bothered to really look at what it says. It's not new age at all.
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Summary: READ THIS BOOK ASAP!
Review: This book is inspiring. It motivates thought about religion, creation, and the destruction of the world. The reader is compelled to share the ideas portrayed in the novel to anyone who is willing to listen in order to try to help save the world. After reading this book it is hard to do everyday things without thinking about Ishmael's ideas. Amazingly, Quinn weaves a strong friendship and a sense of self-confidence into this story about the eventual destruction of the Earth. Overall, if everybody reads this book and practices its ideas there WILL be hope for the future.
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Summary: Light at the end of the tunnel?
Review: My goal of late has been to re-align industry with natural systems - but have been questioning many of my assumptions about the viability of this goal. Ishmael speaks of a critical shift in the story we tell ourselves (& thus enact). I found the book a godsend to help me push through to a new story of how to live as humans in accord with natural law. Some reviews have criticized its presentation. My hope would be rather that more books by other authors would spring up that present a similar change of world view - but in widely varied language - so as to reach a greater audience. However this book spoke clearly to me - and I highly recommend it to everyone.
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Summary: Worthless
Review: If it were not required for a humanities class, this book would have found its way to the trash long before I had the misfortune to finish. The book is nothing more than new age fodder for wanna-be hippies and baby boomers looking for answers to how their lives became so empty. I can say that Mr. Quinn needs to get out of whatever commune of self help and get rich quick guru's he's stuck in, and find his way to the real world.
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Summary: Read Ishmael Carefully
Review: I've read several reviews of this book and found that, despite Quinn's careful attempts to get his message across clearly and unequivocally, many readers misunderstand the finer points of Ishmael's arguments and end up praising or condemning Ishmael for the wrong reasons. Here is a short list of common misunderstandings you're likely to encounter in the course of reading reviews of this book: (1) The central message is a hackneyed statement about saving the planet: All we have to do is this or that, treat the earth or each other better, etc.... No, the author has no such message. He is not even concerned with saving the planet. He merely points out that, in the past, there were many ways a human could make a living in the world that did not threaten to render the planet uninhabitable for him and other human beings. As George Carlin once said: "The planet isn't going anywhere. We are!" The author recommends that if we are concerned about our future, then we should find out as much as we can about these other ways of living in the world and what made them sustainable. (2) This is communism. No, this is tribalism, the cultural traits of which have been found to be conducive to sutainable ways of living. Communist countries operate the same unsustainable lifestyle as democratic countries and are just as hierarchical and corrupt. Nothing new, except the academic devaluation of the individual. In democratic countries, the devaluation is not openly professed, only practiced and theoretically implied. Progress means the same thing in both societies: the technological displacement of people. (3) The ape is "omniscient"; skeptics beware. Skeptics always beware. Ishmael is the ultimate skeptic. He takes nothing for granted. He bases his arguments on information available to any human with a library card. You'll remember that when the student entered Ishmael's room, he noticed dozens of books on history and anthropology piled up on the shelf. You don't have to take Ishmael's word for granted. If you're skeptical, go look it up. The ape is not omniscient; he's well informed. (4) The book proclaims: "there is something unnatural about the way we live." I am in complete agreement with this. There is nothing natural about the way we live. But there's nothing natural about the way any human has ever lived. There's never been an all-natural people. We are and have always been all-cultural. Nature supplies us with the urges to satisfy certain life imperatives (i.e. nutritional, procreative, protective, etc...). But culture determines the way we go about responding to these urges; that is to say, there is nothing natural about the way we satisfy these natural desires. We may be at a loss to change nature and the urges we feel, but we are capable of constructing a better, more sustainable way of responding to nature's edicts. (5) Based on the arguments of the book, one could conclude that "we, as a species, are...." Quinn has nothing conclusive to say about humanity or "we as a species," except that every human is culturally dependent and that the bulk of the information that constitutes culture is mythological (see my review "Not Theology, Not Self-Help, Not Edification"). His main concern here is with the general evolution of two distinct ways of living on this planet. One is sustainable, the other is not. We as a species have not messed things up. One culture out of tens of thousands has managed to make a mess of things. By engaging in unsustainable behavior that threatens to destroy the very resources upon which humans everywhere depend (i.e. totalitarian agriculture), we (not as a species, but as a single culture) are precipitating the extinction of our kind.
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