When I first picked it up, I was a happy-go-lucky freshman in college, so preoccupied with getting an A in expository writing class that I didn’t even think twice about what I was reading. But it must’ve planted some kind of seed, because a few years later, something compelled me to salvage it from the trunk of my car, where it was well on its way to the donation box at my local library.

By then, I was a bitter college drop-out, sorely disenchanted with where my seemingly successful life had been heading, and disappointed with, well, everything. It was during this second run at reading Ishmael that something really hit the spot.

Like the pessimistic narrator of the book, my overwhelming feeling was “What’s the use in trying?” It seemed like no matter what I did to “help” the environment, things continued getting worse…I was, at best, making things a little less bad.

Ultimately, I was convinced that human progress and environmental health were mutually exclusive. And most of the 6 billion people on Earth had made their choice. Who could blame them?

It was through the perspective of a teacher named Ishmael that I finally began to see this conflict in a different light. And once I got over the fact that Ishmael was a telepathic ape, I started to understand where he was coming from.

One of the first things that Ishmael teaches is that while most people must make a choice between self-interest and environmental destruction, that choice is NOT a condition of being human…It’s a condition of modern civilization.

We live in a system where you can’t do much of anything without somehow degrading the environment. Even our most noble efforts, from recycling to vegetarianism, entail doing harm, albeit less than usual. As Ishmael puts it, “You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

For the majority of the book, Ishmael goes to great lengths to define this faulty civilization of ours, and why it makes doing anything good for the environment nearly impossible. He explores our system’s origin in what we call the Agricultural Revolution, when people spontaneously decided that the way they’d been living [sustainably] for around 3 million years just wasn’t good enough. He goes on to illustrate the cultural beliefs that kept this new lifestyle experiment going, and how this civilization ended up, quite literally, conquering the world (as it’s still doing to this day).

But if there’s any lesson you should take away from Ishmael, it’s his assertion that there is no “one right way to live.”

Quite possibly the most damaging belief that permeates our civilization is the idea that modern civilized life is the only acceptable way to live, and that it just doesn’t get any better than this. Such assumptions are at the core of our systematic destruction of cultural and ecological diversity. Combine it with an undying conviction that humans are a living exception to the laws of nature, and you have a recipe for disaster—i.e., extinction.

By far, your biggest challenge in understanding Ishmael will be putting down this book without feeling disappointed or betrayed that he didn’t tell you exactly what to do.

Hoards of readers (including myself) bombarded the Ishmael website after closing the book and feeling the same way the narrator did—like Ishmael didn’t finish the job. And only after having read this book for somewhere around the 8th time did I finally realize why the author left us hanging…

In asking Daniel Quinn to tell us what to do, to give us a specific, magic formula for making everything better, we’re asking him for “one right way.” We’re asking him to conform to the very principle that he seeks to expose.

But if you visit the Ishmael website, or if you ever get a chance to take Daniel Quinn out to lunch and ask him what you should do, he’ll probably express to you (through an eloquent analogy or a quirky parable) that if you really want to change things, you’re going to have to stop looking for one-size-fits-all solutions. After all, that kind of mentality is what got us into trouble in the first place.

Ultimately, Quinn’s own ambitions are made known at the end of the book, when it becomes clear that Ishmael’s advice to the narrator constitutes the author’s own mission:

“You must change people’s minds. And you can’t just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they’ve lost—something that makes better sense…”

If you decide to read this book, arm yourself with a dose of humility and be prepared for a whole lot of introspection. Only those with monumental walls of ignorance in their lives will be able to read this book without questioning how they see—and therefore treat—the world of which they are a part.

I’ve put together a collection of striking excerpts and quotations that really stuck with me after reading Ishmael. I hope they’ll articulate the ideas that have been floating around in your head as well as they did for me.

There is no shortage of Ishmael-related websites, but among my favorites are:
-Ishmael.org Get it straight from the horse's mouth.
-FriendsOfIshmael.org A friend of Ishmael is a friend of mine.
-IshCon.org “Helping people who are in search of a new vision to find each other.”
-ReadIshmael.com The case for Ishmael.

If you found this review helpful and you decide to buy Ishmael (or any of the books recommended on this site), please do so from Amazon through one of these links. Your courtesy will help keep this site going, and would be greatly appreciated by me.