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1 out of 5
by
Sherri
from
Fresno, CA | Mar 18, 2008
This book gets many 5-star reviews and is touted as “life changing”.
My comment: “GET A LIFE!!!” This could possibly be THE WORST book I have ever read. I have been reading this book forever! I am so glad I am finished!
It’s 200+ pages of torture! (This size of book I would normally devour in 1-2 days.) It’s a sociology lecture --- a cringingly horrible, horrible, didactic book. And to top it off, it’s horribly written.
This telepathic gorilla pontificates on culture, his take on the book of Genesis, and re-evaluates mankind’s philosophy on life and how we're killing the world. His canned banter with his obtuse human student is more than annoying – it’s offensive. It’s condescending, full of piteous prose, even worse philosophy and false history, not to mention the pitiful interpretation of the Bible.
I would recommend this book for:
· Undergraduate philosophy majors ????
· People who don't know anything and are willing to be treated like idiots…….
· Chris Matthews
· Al Gore and friends!
May I share some of the reviews I DO agree with:
· “A talking gorilla is the only one who can convince a yuppie to give up his evil ways; no wonder the world is in the state that it is in. I've met a lot of people who love this book, but I was just disgusted from beginning to end.
· “Too lava-lamps, hug-a-tree, squishy-fruity for my taste.”
· “No amount of perceived philosophical insight could make up for the way this book butchers the English language and thoroughly disrespects the notion of literature. If you value cohesiveness and writing in general, I urge you to stay away.”
· “I was incredibly annoyed by the dialogue and slow pace of the book and the main character’s block-headedness: ‘But Ishmael, I just don't get it..., please explain again for the next 45 minutes."
· “This book just annoyed the heck out of me.”
· “Ridiculous, unless of course Quinn (the author) is a 6th grader from Tennessee, in which case I'm impressed.”
· “Who needs Ishmael when we have Al Gore?”
· “Hated this. Recommended by a friend. Now I know that religion is not only false, but it’s also evil. And humans are nothing more than jellyfish a bit farther down the evolutionary path.” Really!!!!!
· “I'm embarrassed I read it. Pure garbage.”
· “This book was really annoying and insulting, and so sanctimonious! Blech!”
· “Conceited, pretentious, overdone, belabored: perfect match for Al gore in an ape suit.”
· “Are you over forty years old but have somehow slid through life without forming a single firm philosophical principle? Have you missed your chance to take a stand – any stand at all? Do you have a vague dislike of society - a nascent antiestablishmentarianism that you've never given voice to - but lack the courage and curiosity necessary to give form to your rebellion? Are you nominally scientific (or well, nominally religious!!), but willing to believe that ancient humans were psychic, vegetarian, and lived in harmony with all nature? Are you dying spiritually but unwilling to give up your SUV? Are you so gutless that you'll sacrifice what values you have for the smallest smug feeling of comfort? If you've weakly nodded in agreement to any of those questions, this is the book for you,…….. you spineless toad.”
· “I absolutely HATED this book.”
· “Unforgivable. Instead of reading it, why not beat yourself over the head with a brick for an hour?”
· AND MY PERSONAL FAVORITE:
“I would rather eat glass than read this book again.”
SO...why did I waste my time reading this book? Ahhh………...there’s “the rub”!! I try to read, with my children, all the books their schools require of them ----
It was required reading for my high school Junior!!! Errrrgggggggg!!!!!!
17 people found this review helpful
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1 out of 5
by
Anna
from
Oakland, CA | Mar 24, 2008
My biggest problem with primitivism as a philosophy is its inherent hypocrisy. Notice how it's always highly educated white dudes insulated from the world who clamor for a return to some idealized "simpler" life? In the case of this book, it's a distinguished professor haughtily preaching about how we should learn some lessons from hunter-gatherer people, channeling his philosophy through a gorilla character who converses with an "everyman" character. Ishmael the gorilla makes a passing derogatory mention of the "noble savage" idea, then spends the rest of the book romanticizing and idealizing the hunter-gatherer cultures, trying to get across the idea that modern Western people have trouble seeing merit in such cultures because we've been brainwashed by our industrialized society.
But the thing is, going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle would mean a goodbye to literacy, to book publishing, to all the things without which Daniel Quinn and others like him would have no more literary soapbox to stand on. Instead, he'd be busy carrying his life on his back as he trudged across the plains looking for food and trying to not get eaten by lions. He'd die before the age of 40 of some perfectly treatable disease -- that is, if he hadn't died while being born or during childhood.
The extreme utopianism and naivete pissed me off so much that I did some research on the anarcho-primitivist philosophy behind it. Turns out my views on this matter match those of Noam Chomsky, who wrote the following in "Chomsky on Anarchism":
I do not think they are realizing that what they are calling for is the mass genocide of millions of people because of the way society is now structured and organized, urban life and so forth. If you eliminate these structures, everybody dies. For example, I can't grow my own food. It's a nice idea, but it's not going to work, not in this world. And in fact, none of us want to live a hunter-gatherer life. There are just too many things in life that the modern world offers us. In just plain terms of survival, what they are calling for is the worst mass genocide in human history. And unless one thinks through these things, it's not really serious.
Indeed, mass genocide is exactly what Quinn advocates in "Ishmael." One of his arguments is that the world's population is growing and draining the Earth's resources, and to control the population we must reduce the food supply, specifically to the parts of the world that are already experiencing famine. To put it another way, he's in favor of starving a million people in Africa and India whose only crime was being born in the wrong time and the wrong place. Nice, Dr. Quinn. Why not just make it simpler and kill off the poorest 10 percent of the world's population? That part of the book smelled a lot like Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal" to me, except unfortunately Quinn is not an intentional satirist.
Another issue was the deeply rooted sexism in both the language and the thought process. Here's a quote about why "Mother Culture" is always feminine in the text: "Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer..." Because of course, a woman's role is always as mother and nurturer and not much else.
The starting premise of this book is that the human race is quickly destroying the Earth, and we will kill ourselves and take the planet with us if we don't stop. This is a premise with actual scientific proof behind it. Humans believe that they are the end-all be-all of evolution, and therefore the planet belongs to them to do as they please with no regard for other species or life forms, and that's what's going to kill us, sooner than later. Nothing to disagree with, there. But Quinn's "solution" is a bunch of hypocritical and unrealistic drivel.
All that being said, I know that for some people (including my boyfriend, who loves this book and is the reason I read it in the first place), "Ishmael" is what opened their eyes to the dire need to protect the environment. That's great. I just hope that no one ends their search for a solution with this book and this philosophy.
17 people found this review helpful
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1 out of 5
by
Scott
from
Madison, WI | May 8, 2007
I was looking for something to read one day and ended up picking up Ishmael. I was incredibly annoyed by the dialouge and slow pace of the book. And I found myself disagreeing quite often with the philosophy of the book, and even being annoyed by Quinn's style so much that when I did agree I would try to think of counter arguments just so I didn't have to agree.
Most annoying to me was Alan Lomax's (the main character not immediately indentified) block-headedness. To move the 'story' forward Quinn sacrifices style and makes Alan into a bumbling idiot who from the reader's perspective can't seem to get the most basic grip on Ishmael's philosophy lesson.
"But Ishmael, I just don't get it..., please explain again for the next 45 minutes." The reference I'll make of Ishmael's boring ramblings is to Turkatron, who makes random appearances in Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Minus all essence of humor.
7 people found this review helpful
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2 out of 5
by
Cody
from
Iowa City, IA | Mar 29, 2008
I've read about 20 reviews of Ishmael, and of those no one mentioned how extremely sexist this book is. It isn't just in the language (constantly referring to humans as man or mankind), but it's also actively present in the dialog. For example, this is a direct quote from a character answering why he refers to culture in the feminine, "Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer..." There is also this big "reinterpretation" of the story of Adam & Eve in which the overarching blame for the "Fall of Man" ends up on the woman. Just like in the original story.
Okay, nothing downright shocking but what pisses me off is that this book is supposed to be this radical challenge to mainstream thinking. It challenges what we hold as basic truths by rattling the very foundations of our belief systems. In many ways this books does that very well, but it cannot be complete when the representative voice of the nonhuman world continues to reinforce patriarchy. Not very iconoclastic.
Also, the overuse of Socratic method in the dialog was too much. Probably 90% of the book. I mean, come on. The questions were always asked as if there could only be one answer, which ended up leaving some holes.
All that said the main argument of the book is that human beings are doomed exactly because we in "civilization" believe ourselves to be the most important aspect of the world and that we should therefore conquer & rule everything below us. We've been living at odds with the nonhuman world since the dawn of agriculture.
This coincides with another book I'm reading. In No Turning Back Freedman traces the domination & oppression of women back to the same period of time, when women were recognized for their ability to not only be a source of labor but to also produce children, another source of labor. This was the beginning of property, and women & their children were subjugated as property of men.
Unfortunately the teacher in Ishmael gives little hope for change. He advocates a shift to hunter/gatherer culture as the only solution to this planet's dire situation wrought by humankind (he does not say a "return to" since hunter/gatherer societies have their own story of progress, much different than that of agriculturally based societies). His strategy is to instruct his student to seek his own students in order to send this message into human culture. I wholeheartedly believe in education as fundamental to positive change, but at the end of this book, I felt like it was a bleak and futile solution to the complex of problems facing the planet since humans entered the neolithic era.
10 people found this review helpful
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1 out of 5
by
Esteban
from
The United States | Mar 18, 2010
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Behold the majesty of Curious George as he gets all dialogue-y on your ass! Your encounter will leave you changed! You, too, may find yourself flinging poop at civilization along with our simian savior!
A telepathic gorilla develops something like consciousness, is happily able to flower under the attentive stewardship of a George Soros-type philanthropist and waxes philosophical to a disenchanted idealist. This book stinks of anthropological and ecological platitudes which I think you would be better served acquiring by taking a few puffs of the wacky weed and watching the Pearl Jam video for Do the Evolution.
And something that seems to be missing from every review of this book I’ve read thus far -- the story’s narrator is barely unnerved by a telepathic gorilla. I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but if I ever tell you that my dog is talking to me, please contact the authorities. I’m sure I’ll thank you for it later. I mean, David Berkowitz does it, and he’s a serial killer; this guy does it, and he wants to roll back civilization to the hunter-gatherer stage. I’m down with Mother Earth and all that jazz, but psychopathology is psychopathology.
7 people found this review helpful