Ishmael

Rating:
Summary: OUTDATED AND TRITE
Review: This book was insulting to read. It assumed its readers did not have a basic understanding of evolution, anthropology and philosophy. Ishmeal is about a great ape who teaches a human about our place in the world, trite, very trite. It was tremendously annoying to have to imagine an erudite gorilla pontificating telepathically to a student while chewing on a stick.

This book is very outdated. Its message can be summed up in one sentence...Humans are not the center of the universe and therefore should not live that way. There, I just saved you $13.95 (plus shipping and handling).

Rating:
Summary: Think. Ponder. Worry about your own role in the world
Review: This unique and powerful novel will change the way you view the world, the history of humankind, and the destruction we are perpetuating on Mother Earth. One reviewer describes it as "socially urgent", and I would also agree that any human being of any religion, any social class, and any race will find universal truths here - it is indeed a "spiritual adventure". It was written to rock our world and it is a powerful argument for the re-examination of our own behavior in terms of the lives we lead and the environment and other species we are destroying. Not one for great social activism, this book still moved me in a way that both exhilarated and depressed me, but mostly scared me. It left me with the feeling that I am too small and insignificant to change the path of this primitive flying machine we call our culture. The story itself is a bit odd. The narrator responds to a simple advertisement by a teacher seeking an 'earnest pupil'. The teacher turns out to be a great ape (which is necessary because the human being needs to view the world and his culture through the eyes of a non-human species). Ishmael, the great Ape, is indeed a powerful teacher. I learned as much from him and through this dialogue as any education setting in which I have ever been engaged. Ishmael explains our cultural perspectives, our biological evolution, he even explains the social and historical meanings in Genesis (a particularly thought-provoking thesis). This is not a long or complicated book, but it is one of overwhelming urgency that anyone can understand and digest. I urge you to read this.

Rating:
Summary: Mind blowing!
Review: A recent reviewer of age 14 recently wrote that Ishmael was the most boring book he ever read. He had been forced to read it in school and complained that there was no "action" in the book. It has been said that "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear." Obviously, this young person was not ready to meet Ishmael. He went on to say that he hopes no other kid will ever have to read the book again. I read the book when I was a teenager and I still consider it the best book I ever did read. And I know many other young people who love this book and find it changed the way they view the world and see their place in it.

Perhaps some people can never appreciate a book like Ishmael, but I rarely find that anyone who reads this book thinks it's boring. Of course, it makes you actually THINK, so if you're not one prone to actually thinking, and you're just looking for an action-adventure, maybe you should read The Hardy Boys. But perhaps the person being forced to read the book in school, didn't give it a chance. I know some people who hated it when they read it in school and then loved it in their twenties. I think the teachers are doing well by having people read this book, though, because it truly is the most important book ever written.

"Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person." Read Ishmael and let him teach you a story few in our culture have heard. Enter into dialogue vicariously through this wonderful book and you will never see things the same again!

Rating:
Summary: Worst book I ever read
Review: Ishmael, is personally, the worst book I ever read. I had to read it for school, and I was falling asleep trying to read it. There is no action, whatsoever. In like the whole book, they are sitting in that room, discussing the end of the world. The slightest action takes place when Ishmael goes to the cricus, but still, boooooring. After they talked and talked for the whole book, Ishmael dies, and it just ends right there. The man doesn't even do anything. Just cuts off with the writing on the poster. Personally, I hope that no one my age has to ever read this book again, for it is incredibly boring.

Rating:
Summary: Ideas for a new eco-consciousness?
Review: Bravo Daniel.

He wanted us to think, to stir debate, to get us to see life from another perspective.

Daniel Quinn's Ishmael has a strong narrative hook - a guru gorilla - which sets the book apart from many of the too-sanctimonious tomes which scold us for our environmentally-unfriendly behavior.

Are we takers when we should be leavers?

You'll make up your own mind, of course, but I think Daniel has encouraged thousands of people to rethink their relationship with the earth. He explains ideas that people may have felt, but not articulated. Has he been successful? Ishmael has 322 reader reviews on amazon.com, as of this morning, and I challenge you to find many other books which have touched so many people so deeply.

Rating:
Summary: Life Changing Book!!!
Review: This book is amazing! Take away conceptions of anything one might want to place on this book- and look at what it's trying to say. It tells us the history of man, in a book that many would choose to pick up, a fiction. If one hasn't thought of the ideas that Quinn gives us, they can't ignore them after. I suggest this book with every fiber of my being. There's a message in here that needs to be heard. A beautiful one. Thank you Daniel Quinn!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Our cultural mythology is driving us toward self-destruction
Review: With the clever strategy of using a non-human animal (a gorilla) as his main character, Daniel Quinn manages to address very important questions about human beings and society. Indeed, he points out that if we are living the way we are now, it is because of the myths we internalized throughout our history. Thus, despite the fact that we are not consciously aware of what these myths are, or that they even exist, they do influence our every day lives. The main point of the book is to make us aware of our own cultural myths by educating us about other world cultures that do not share the same mythology. Quinn claims that the core belief of our culture is something like this: "Man was meant to rule over the entire world, and use all its resources for his own good, and this is the one right way to live. However, there is something fundamentally wrong with human nature, and that is why things are not going well for us." Daniel Quinn then goes on arguing that it is this belief that is driving our species toward catastophe, as human beings are using up the Earth's resources too quickly, as well as destroying species they think are not useful to them, thus putting in danger the fragile equilibrium of the web of life, which evolved over many million years. Quinn brings us the positive message that there is nothing wrong with human nature per se, and that what is leading us toward self-destruction is only the mythology of our own culture, which we have to change if we want our species to have a future. It is a very interesting and fascinating trip to follow Ishmael back in time to discover the origins of our cultural myths as, if this book is a fiction for practical purposes, it is remarkably well documented with real anthropological studies and observations. Whether you agree with Quinn's interpretations or not, you will look at the state of things from a different angle, as you will then try to uncover why things we take so often for granted came to be the way they are now. Something is going wrong with the world, we all have this feeling deep inside us; it is now time to know why and to do something about it! . . . .

Rating:
Summary: Where it led me
Review: The story of Ishmael was not the guru type book I thought it would be. It did not answer all the questions in my universe. But I will give it 5 stars because it did what really great books do, it made me ask better questions. No more questions of how to live in this society. A lot of questions of how I want to live as a human on a daily basis get asked now. Deliberate lifestyle is something I have worked for a long time. This book gave me a new way of looking at what I am doing and where it is leading me in relation to the rest of the society that I live in.

Rating:
Summary: neither/nor
Review: First of all, this is not a "novel." Nor is it "an adventure of the mind and soul" (at least not for my unadventurous mind and soul). It is an attempt to construct an argument: that our society is on the brink of disaster, because it is founded on the erroneous proposition that humanity owns the world. When Quinn tries to shake things up by switching from faux-Socratic-dialogue mode into some kind of story, he falls flat on his face with an annoying digression ("I pray about teeth...") that seems to have absolutely no point other than killing Ishmael, which Quinn could just as easily have done with a falling piano or something.

But the ludicrousness of the plot is not really relevant; "Ishmael" is, at heart, an argument, not a story (I only wish Quinn had realised that...). So what about that argument? Well, first of all, Quinn is not really as even-handed as he makes himself out to be. His whole book is founded on a MORAL platform, not an ecological one; it seems to me that the reason he doesn't come out and say "Western civilization is bad" is not because of any real objectivity, but because of a pusillanimous post-whatever unwillingness to be explicit about his metaphysics. Hey, Quinn, I got news for ya: "life is better than death" is a moral proposition, as you should know, if you've read your Nietzsche aright. It's not self-evident; just ask Keats. And it's no good trying to evade the question by considering the ecological rather than the personal level; the question is exactly the same there. Is Earth really better than, say, Neptune, just because it has life? I'm not saying that this kind of question should not be answered, or that it is unanswerable; I have absolutely no problem with metaphysical moral standards, per se. But, in this kind of argumentative writing, one should always be as explicit as possible about these things, and Quinn essentially puts one over on us by assuming that we'll agree with him. (A related issue is Quinn's use of the idea of "gods": he explicitly says that he's using the gods only as a kind of image, but then he goes ahead and says things like "the Leavers are the people who live in the hands of the gods," a blatantly moralizing aphorism which is correct, given what Quinn means by "gods," but which is still offensive because its morality is kept hidden.)

As far as metaphysics goes, my real beef is not with the proposition that life is better than death (although I would modify it and say that the real distinction is: CONSCIOUSNESS is better than UNCONSCIOUSNESS), but with the proposition that all life is the same. Judging from this book, Quinn doesn't seem to think that human life is any different from, say, hyena life. The only evidence to the contrary is a veiled suggestion toward the end of the book that other forms of life might eventually become sentient in a human-like way, which I think is just silly. Quinn doesn't consider the valuable things that our culture has produced: art, philosophy, and science come to mind. The fact remains (though this may be my ignorance speaking) that only the two cultures that we think of as "Western" and "Eastern" have developed these things extensively; they also happen to be the only surviving "Taker" civilizations (although in this book Quinn ignores the Eastern civilization and insists that only Indo-European culture belongs to the Takers). It seems to me that only in the situation that Takerism produces can these things develop beyond the level of folk disciplines (only in the case of art can one argue that this may not really be a development, and even there I would dispute that argument); I also believe (metaphysically!) that these things are good IN THEMSELVES. It not just whether you live, but how you live.

Basically, I'll admit it, I agree with Quinn. Our culture does need to change, drastically. I don't believe that we will put an end to all life on the planet, or even to our life as a species, but I do think that we will lose much of what we have achieved (the good along with the bad) if we continue to use the world as we have been using it. But I don't think that Quinn's REASONS are good enough, and I don't think that his solutions are any good at all (he doesn't really go into them much in "Ishmael," but from his web-site I gather that they pretty much amount to breaking everything down to the smallest possible local level, so Quinn's dream civilization is basically indistinguishable from radical right-wing anti-big-governmentism).

So, basically, I give Quinn three stars 'cuz he's got an interesting case to make and he makes it reasonably well (although the idea that our culture is headed for inevitable death is expressed in an almost equally convincing and infinitely more aesthetically valuable way in "Gravity's Rainbow"). I then take away one star because he tries to sneak his moral substructure past us. Also, there are a few factual points that I think he got wrong, but they're relatively unimportant. So, read the book if you want, it won't kill you. Just take what Quinn says with a grain of salt.

Rating:
Summary: A very good book with an important lesson.
Review: While reading through most of the already present reviews before I read this book, I found many of the following words or phrases: tedious, boring, long, no plot, and plain stupid. I disagree with all of the above. This book will and already is changing a lot of peoples minds. It isn't tedious, boring, or long, I didn't put it down since I picked it up and read it in 2 days. It has a plot, a thin one, but that wasn't the point of the book. It was supposed to "show a creative and positive solution to a world problem." It does. It isn't stupid. Calling it supid is like saying your ears are tuned into Mother Culture too much. I also heard one person say something like, "He wants us to live by natural means." First, natural is a horrible word because, where else to live but nature? Are we not in "nature"? Second, if you mean in the woods, he doesn't mean that, and you really misread this book. We couldn't live that way...