Climate Change Confusion

            The other day I watched a documentary about glaciers that reminded me of Ishmael. This documentary was called Chasing Ice and it was very frightening. The film crew travelled around the globe placing time lapse cameras and pointing them towards major glaciers. These cameras were left there for something like three years and at the end of these three years the footage was reviewed. What was found didn’t really surprise me, most of these glaciers had melted but the degree to which the melt had occurred was very shocking. To see the sheer size of the glaciers that were melting on a very human time scale was scary. This documentary did a great job of just displaying evidence in a digestible manner. The curious part about this was that it entirely convinced me that drastic action was necessary in order to effectively combat climate change. Ishmael had solicited the opposite response in me and I still don’t quite understand why. I don’t know where I stand now on the issue now.

            

Overall reaction to the book

            I think that my opinion about Ishmael has been communicated in my other blog posts, however, for the sake of completing the blog assignment, here are my thoughts about the book as a whole. For one, I thought that many of Quinn’s ideas were sound, particularly those dealing with resource depletion and animal ethics. However, the solutions presented were very farfetched and idealistic. Furthermore, the book was not nearly as challenging as it should have been for an AP English project.

            Like Quinn, I believe that there are problems which need to be addressed in the future. Without fixing these problems there will inevitably be a shortage of natural resources. However, I tend to be an optimist in that I believe humanity will be able to deal with these problems simply because we must. I think that the intent in writing Ishmael was to catalyze some sort of change in the behavior of the younger generation. However, it felt like propaganda because it provided its arguments without offering facts as support. The entire book I was unable to trust that darn gorilla because he so rarely gave supporting evidence. I sincerely wish I had not chosen to read this book especially because I have to write five blog posts which are really just me complaining.

            Quinn’s ideas about animal sentience and the value of life may be ahead of his time and I commend him for that. I also agree with his views about human-centrism and its potential to distort truth. I guess my main issue with Quinn right now is that I didn’t like his writing style. I really don’t have much more to say about this book.

AP Worthy?

Before the end of the second chapter of Ishmael, I knew that I had made a poor selection for the blog post project. While other books in my AP English class had challenged me, forcing me to read beyond the literal meaning, I found that Quinn wrote plainly and explicitly. Quinn does not write literature, and Ishmael is by no means AP worthy. One reason for this is that there is extremely limited use of literary devices to enhance the meaning of the novel. Furthermore, the use of the English language in general is very simplistic and boring. I do not recommend this book to anyone looking for a thought provoking or challenging read. In fact, I don’t think I would recommend this book to anyone in high school.

In my opinion, the major themes of Ishmael do not have an emotional or human element. The book lacks an underlying meaning which is personally or emotionally relatable for the reader. As such, I found that reading the book was more of a chore than something that was enjoyable. To save readers the time needed to actually read the book, here is a passage which I felt summarized the overall theme fairly well:

“Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in the story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and as a reward, being fed. There is no ‘something else.’ To step out of this story is to fall off the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.” (Quinn 11)

For the sake of sharing my delight, here are some examples of literary devices used in Ishmael. Here is a simile: “Then he sat back with a sigh that rumbled through the glass like a distant volcano.” Quinn also employs personification in his discussion of the western collective unconscious which he calls Mother Culture. I don’t quite understand the reason for using this metaphor other than to make an abstract concept more concrete and detestable. Admittedly, Quinn does use other literary devices occasionally, but they rarely are used to develop a larger meaning. This lack of meaningful literary devices supports the idea that Ishmael is not literature.