Ishmael & Providence by Daniel Quinn | Teen Ink

Ishmael & Providence by Daniel Quinn MAG

By Anonymous

   Are you looking for a teacher? I give you a gorilla named Ishmael. Ishmael (by Daniel Quinn) has become an underground inspiration to many people. It is about a man's education at the hands of a gorilla.

The gorilla puts an ad in the classifieds, explaining he is a teacher looking for a student who must have an earnest desire to save the world. It is a remarkable journey, remarkable because of Quinn's style, voice, and incredible insights. The book is an effort (a successful one) to explain "how things came to be this way."

I was given these books by perhaps the brightest person in my school, and it is no wonder that they are of the top two books of all time on that person's list.

Make no mistake, this book deserved the impressive award that it won. The Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award's panel of judges included such notables as Ray Bradbury and was interested in finding something new, something fresh. What it found was Ishmael an absolutely astounding book that I don't wish to summarize because I feel the surprises and insights belong to Quinn alone.

In the tradition of many life-altering books (like those by Ayn Rand or James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy), this book will give you a vocabulary to describe a new angle of the world.

Perhaps the only thing better than reading such a great book is to read about the journey that created its writing - Daniel Quinn's amazing autobiography and a sequel to Ishmael, entitled Providence. This describes Quinn's loneliness as a young man struggling to as a genius until he realized that he is part of a thing called the human race. It is a book about the exploration of personal religion, about finding direction in your life, and finding out how needed each of us is in the world.

Daniel Quinn's books challenge the way in which the world is perceived. He probes beyond the myths of our culture to explore the reasons behind our behavior.

Improve your vision C read these books





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