The Lesson from Ishmael by Quinn There are some books that you can just sit back and enjoy, just let the author's words wash over you and, more importantly, 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 searching for a teacher, and not just any teacher. He wants someone to show him what life is all about. This is how he finds Ishmaël, a meiutic teacher (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. Most of the book consists of their conversations, in which Ishmael explains how things got this way (in terms of human culture, starting with the agricultural revolution). Ishmael shows the narrator exactly what is wrong in our society: the reasoning that there is only one right way to live, and that way is the conquest of the planet by humans. Daniel Quinn points out that many other cultures, particularly those with a tribal lifestyle, function,