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I've been hearing a lot about this book. Has anyone read it?

Some reviews on amazon.com:



This book changed the way I live my life!, January 1, 2001
Reviewer: from New Jersey USA

This book completely changed the way I look at the world around me. Much of it took things I had always been troubled with, and explained them in such a clear and rational way that I found myself thinking "I *knew* that!"

This book is written in the form of a novel, which makes it easy to read, but it's actually a set of ideas and teachings. Ishmael is a gorilla, and a teacher (how and why he is able to speak with his unnamed human pupil is unimportant). Everyone who reads the book will get something different out of it, but that's okay. In the end, the idea that our culture has come to believe that humans are a cursed lot is throughly refuted. The difference between the two main cultures in the world (which he called the Takers - our culture, and the Leavers) clearly illistrates that we can live in the world without destroying it.

I haven't met a person yet who's life has not be dramatically effected after reading Ishmael. It's not a preachy book telling you how to live your life. It will cause you to closely examine the life we are all living and think seriously of what should be done to change it.



Book Description

The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human being has ever heard. It is a story that extends backward and forward over the lifespan of the earth from the birth of time to a future there is still time save. Like all great teachers, Ishmael refuses to make the lesson easy; he demands the final illumination to come from within ourselves. Is it man's destiny to rule the world? Or is it a higher destiny possible for him-- one more wonderful than he has ever imagined?

Ingram

An award-winning, compelling novel of spiritual adventure about a gorilla named Ishmael, who possesses immense wisdom, and the man who becomes his pupil, offers answers to the world's most pressing moral dilemmas.

From Kirkus Reviews

Here's the novel that, out of 2500 submissions, won the ecological-minded Turner Tomorrow Award--and caused a mutiny among the judges when it was awarded the $500,000 first prize. Is it that good--or bad? No, but it's certainly unusual, even eccentric, enough to place Quinn (the paperback Dreamer, 1988) on the cult literary map.

What's most unusual is that this novel scarcely is one: beneath a thin narrative glaze, it's really a series of Socratic dialogues between man and ape, with the ape as Socrates. The nameless man, who narrates, answers a newspaper ad (``TEACHER seeks pupil...'') that takes him to a shabby office tenanted by a giant gorilla; lo! the ape begins to talk to him telepathically (Quinn's failure to explain this ability is typical of his approach: idea supersedes story). Over several days, the ape, Ishmael, as gruff as his Greek model, drags the man into a new understanding of humanity's place in the world. In a nutshell, Ishmael argues that humanity has evolved two ways of living: There are the
``Leavers,'' or hunter-gatherers (e.g., Bushmen), who live in harmony with the rest of life; and there are the ``Takers'' (our civilization), who arose with the agricultural revolution, aim to conquer the rest of life, and are destroying it in the process. Takers, Ishmael says, have woven a ``story'' to rationalize their conquest; central to this story is the idea that humanity is flawed--e.g., as told in the Bible. But not so, Ishmael proclaims; only the Taker way is flawed: Leavers offer a method for living well in the world ... A washout as a story, with zero emotional punch; but of substantial intellectual appeal as the extensive Q&A passages (despite their wild generalities and smug self-assurance) invariably challenge and provoke: both Socrates and King Kong might be pleased.

"[Quinn] entrap[s] us in the dialogue itself, in the sweet and terrible lucidity of Ishmael's analysis of the human condition...it was surely for this deep, clear persuasiveness of argument that Ishmael was given its huge prize." -- The Washington Post

"It is as suspenseful, inventive, and socially urgent as any fiction or nonfiction book you are likely to read this or any other year" -- The Austin Chronicle.

"Deserves high marks as a serious -- and all too rare -- effort that is unflinchingly engaged with fundamental life-and-death concerns." -- The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

About the Author
Daniel Quinn's first book, Ishmael, won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, a prize for fiction presenting creative and positive solutions to global problems. He is also the author of Providence, The Story of B, and My Ishmael.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...#05533754075000

His other book, "The Story of B," also sounds interesting:

Reader's review: This text explains in common, everyday language some of the problems that are found in our culture. However, it differs from other texts and media in that "The Story of B" identifies these everyday problems as SYSTEMIC in nature--in other words, originating from a known cause. This is like the difference between looking at a physical ailment as THE problem and looking at a physical ailment as a SYMPTOM of some disease. This book will change the way you think.

Also check the "Quotes" Forum.

__________________
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams" - Eleanor Roosevelt

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been years since i read this book.

more deadly to fascists, i think, than woody guthrie's guitar. spells it all out.

i end up listing this book along with The Chalice And The Blade even before The Celestine Prophecies when asked about books that are important to me.

Ishmael still tells almost 'the whole story'. and apes and gorillas are cool, too.

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see, we're STILL on the same damn page.
as in taker cultures vs. leaver cultures and what it means today? yep.

the above book should go hand in hand with The Chalice and The Blade.

also both books were part of the 1990s discussion zeitgeist. that didn't reach its logical terminus, they need to pop back up because The Takers are insane.