Obviously, it’s not a novel like ‘Billy Bathgate’ or ‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord,’ but there is another tradition, very little observed now, of this kind of a book.” “At the height of the controversy,” he says, “there was a lot of talk about whether or not Ishmael was a true novel, which, to me, was a case of looking for what wasn’t there-the great hole in the doughnut, as it were.

Quinn is still quick to defend his work against the criticisms leveled against it in June. Ray Bradbury, the only Turner judge to come to Quinn’s defense during the controversy, has called Ishmael “a lovely book, a wonderful explanation of part of the history of humankind.” Young people especially don’t want to hear it. “The news about nature is, in general, so bad we don’t want to hear it. “Given what the publishing traffic will bear these days, Quinn, whose book has gone through seven complete drafts, deserves his money,” said the Los Angeles Times Book Review, which also liked the ape as a literary device. deep, clear persuasiveness of argument that ‘Ishmael’ was given its huge prize,” the Washington Post said in a feature review that praised “the sweet and terrible lucidity of (the novel’s) analysis” and concluded “it was worth every penny” of the prize.

Given the nature of his book and the furor that first brought “Ishmael” to the public’s eye, Quinn is gratified that critical response to the book has been, thus far, positive. He went to Jesuit schools in his hometown of Omaha, studied with the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton at Our Lady of Gesthemane in Kentucky and received a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in Chicago. Quinn’s philosophies arise from a religious education. “The character of Ishmael didn’t appear until the book’s final version,” Quinn says, “but I always had the idea of someone on the outside looking in.” Ishmael takes his name from “the prototypic biblical figure of the outcast for the very reason that everything he says goes against the grain.”

Most history is written by Takers, which is why Quinn used the device of an outsider-the wise ape-who teaches that humans must learn to regard themselves as part of nature. Quinn’s book interprets Genesis as a piece of political propaganda written by a tribe of Semitic hunter-gatherers (Leavers) in danger of being overrun by their agriculturalist neighbors to the north (Takers). Leavers are the nomadic, aboriginal peoples who leave the Earth as they find it. The Takers are the developed societies that arose with the agricultural revolution-people who alter nature to suit man’s needs. According to Quinn’s view, around the time the Book of Genesis was written, humanity came to be divided into Takers and Leavers.

Ishmael book review