The Lessons from Ishmael by Quinn There are some books that you can just sit back and enjoy, letting the author's words wash over you, and best of all, you don't have to think. And then there's Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. The novel Ishmael, "an adventure of the mind and spirit", opens with a disillusioned and depressed man looking for a teacher, and not just any teacher. He wants someone to show him what life is. And so he finds Ishmael, a meiutic teacher (the one who acts as a midwife to his students, bringing ideas to the surface), who turns out to be a large telepathic gorilla of extraordinary intelligence. The bulk of the book is made up of their conversations, in which Ishmael discusses how things got this way (in terms of human culture, starting with the agricultural revolution). Ishmael shows the narrator exactly what is wrong with our society: the reasoning that there is only one right way to live, and that way is with humans taking over the planet. Daniel Quinn points out that many other cultures, especially those that have a tribal lifestyle, work,