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"I'm going to give you two rules of thumb by which you can identify the people of your culture. Here's one of them. You'll know you're among the people of your culture if the food is all owned, if it's all under lock and key." "Hmmmm," I said. "It's hard to imagine it being any other way." "But of course it once was another way. It was once no more owned than the air or the sunshine are owned." My Ishmael
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(Amazon Germany | Amazon UK) - The original audio version of Ishmael has been reissued by Random House as an audible/audio download. Available at Amazon.com.
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- Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
It almost always happens, when I speak in telephone conferences with university classes or with larger groups,
that someone will ask if I have hope for the future and, if so, why. My answer has always been an intuitive one, the intuition being that in the last fifteen years or so awareness of the perils we face in the immediate future has expanded explosively–and that this in itself provides authentic hope for the future. In Blessed Unrest Paul Hawken, with his extraordinary passion for information, has transformed my mere intuition into a reality. Acting on the same "hunch" as mine, he began to count. . . . "I initially estimated a total of 30,000 environmental organizations around the globe; when I added social justice and indigenous peoples' rights organizations, the number exceeded 100,000. . . . I now believe there are over one–and maybe even two–million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice." He concludes this encyclopedic work with these heartening words: "There is no question that the environmental movement is critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But it is the other way around: the only way we are going to put out the fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name." Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future - Edited by Melissa K. Nelson
Original Instructions is a compilation of 33 presentations made at annual meetings of Bioneers, an organization created in 1990 "to disseminate breakthrough solutions . . . needed to change our way of living on earth to avert global environmental catastrophe."
The presenters are virtually all members of aboriginal peoples, which is what makes the book so uniquely valuable. Fifteen years ago no such book existed–or could have existed. Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Radical Simplicity: Creating an Authentic Life by Dan Price
This is a book for the many hundreds of young (and not-so-young) people who have written to me asking how to go about "walking away" from the Taker lifestyle. Author and "hobo-artist" Dan Price has done that most successfully, using his ingenuity and determination to build an authentic life, a life “hand made” for himself, rather than one dictated by outside circumstances. Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com Or you could order from the publisher, Running Press.
- Being Is Enough : Collective Self-Help for a Sustainable World - by Doug Brown
Doug Brown continues the excellent work begun in Insatiable Is Not Sustainable, this time focusing on the stress we cause ourselves and the world around us by accepting a "have all you can have" and "be all you can be" culture. Writing with extraordinary simplicity, economics professor Brown brings fresh insights to our situation, and proposes specific reforms needed to democratize our economy. Although these reforms would doubtless be opposed (just as unionization and Social Security were), we can be assured that "Profits are not going to go away" as a result of these reforms. "Neither are management, trade, marketing, accounting, corporations, the IMF and WTO, prices, and money. What needs to happen, and can happen, is that these mechanism of capitalism have to be reshaped and redirected to serve new goals--sustainability and social justice, sufficiency and simplicity, tranquility and equality. The radical reforms will do this--on one condition. A cultural revolution must take place--changed minds. If we can make that happen, the rest will be easy." -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference - by Malcolm Gladwell
I generally limit my recommendations to books that have little public exposure. Such is not the case for The Tipping Point, which has been a bestseller for four years now. I recommend it because it affirms (in ways I could not have done) the power of incremental change. Realistically speaking, most of us are limited to doing "little things," and many are disheartened by this. This book, however, shows very persuasively "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference." If the world is saved, I believe it will not because some great superman has taken up our cause but because the number of us doing "little things" (like changing the minds of the people around us) has reached "the tipping point." -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate: Exotic and Unseen Costa Rica - by Jack Ewing, with a foreword by Daniel Quinn
If you enjoy having arcane and even possibly useful information (especially about exotic wildlife), then Monkeys Are Made of Chocolate is a must read for you. Meet a large, log-like reptile and wonder whether it's a caiman or a crocodile? Easy: if it's a caiman, it runs away; if it's a crocodile, it eats you. Troubled by bats in the attic that simply can't be kept out? Install a boa constrictor. Jack Ewing's thirty-year adventure in a Costa Rican jungle has produced a book full of infectious love and amazing lore. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Humanity's Environmental Future: Making Sense in a Troubled World; Getting to the Source: Readings on Sustainable Values - by William Ross McCluney
The appearance of books like Humanity's Environmental Future--serious but very readable, comprehensive, and ambitious--is a very encouraging sign that more and more people with changed minds are making themselves heard; readers will especially appreciate McCluney's chapter on "Taking Action." -- Buy it from Amazon.com Sorry, this one is not available at BookSense.com
Getting to the Source brings together important "source" essays from Rachel Carson, Wendell Berry, Garrett Hardin, Donella Meadows, Thomas Berry, Daniel Quinn, and many others. -- Buy it from Amazon.com Sorry, this one is not available at BookSense.com
- Into The Wild - by Jon Krakauer
I include this book as recommended reading because I hear from so many youngsters who, like Chris McCandless (the subject of the book), dream of fleeing civilization, of striking out on their own in the wilderness, of "living off the land." Although this is primarily the story of McCandless's failure to recognize the difficulties of such an undertaking, the author includes several similar accounts of individuals taking on "the wild" singlehandedly, with the romantic notion that this is what a capable and resourceful person should be able to do. All victims of the Great Forgetting, they were blissfully (and ultimately tragically) unaware that humans did not evolve as rugged individualists, each taking on the task of survival on his or her own. Our ancestors, who universally lived "in the wild," always faced the task tribally and never took it on singlehandedly. They knew that-even with all their survival wisdom, garnered over countless generations-living in the wild is far too much for any isolated individual to cope with. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Dancing with Mosquitoes: To Liberate the Mind from Humanism--A Way To Green the Mind - by Theo Grutter Running into Theo Grutter's book is like running into Jean Liedloff's Continuum Concept: meeting a mind that has
come independently to be in synch with my own. This doesn't mean he's saying things I've said or thought. On the contrary, he continually surprises me with things I haven't said or thought. And he says them well and wittily. Of our frenetic "get ahead" lifestyle that robs our souls to fill our houses with gaudy trinkets: "Is it not the madness of the fool who day after day falls into the same pit, yet is wholly proud to know the trick of how to climb out of it day after day?"
- Of congratulation we award ourselves for our humanitarian greatness in the Third World: "A versatile mind might want to scrutinize with an ecologically-minded eye the greatness of our great white jungle doctors. A truly modern mind that thinks also with a third eye placed generations away might then note that this humanitarian greatness nicely exploding our population there can ultimately cast a great shadow over the flora and fauna of the jungle and stop its people from singing and dancing."
- Composed of very brief essays, this is a book to spend a few minutes with every day, a book for your bedside table. Readers who cherish my work will cherish Dancing with Mosquitoes. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- I include these because so many people have asked about books for
their children, though I must do so with limited enthusiasm. Until late in the nineteenth century, children's stories were contrived for the sole purpose of delivering moral lessons. As such, the stories themselves were just "the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down." The Billibonk stories, I'm afraid, belong to the same tradition, being contrived for the sole purpose of delivering systems-thinking lessons. I will say, however, that the lessons are nonetheless admirable ones. The books (and accompanying "Fieldbooks") are available from Pegasus Communications, Inc., One Moody Street, Waltham MA 02453-5339. They can also be ordered on their website, www.pegasuscom.com . (Also available through Amazon.com -- just click on the book covers, or Oder through BookSense
- Nothing is harder to bring to light than that which is hidden in plain sight, and this is what J. Zornado has undertaken to do in this stunning exposé of the insidious systemic mechanisms that perpetuate our demented and tormented culture, generation after generation. I count Inventing the Child among the two or three most eye-opening, illuminating, and important books I've ever read. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Besides being a wise, witty and engrossing thriller, fascinating on every page, Redheads is one of those very rare novels that you put down knowing you've gained a whole new understanding of how things really work in the wild, wicked world out there. If such a thing is imaginable (and I hope it is), this book does for the struggle to save the rain forests of Borneo what Catch 22 did for the struggle to stay alive in World War II. It's an experience that will stay with you, I guarantee it. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Alan Weisman, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, Chelsea Green Pub. Co., 1998. The record of an extraordinary experiment in sustainable development and appropriate technology, the transformation of a Colombian village so successful that the United Nations has called it a model for the developing world. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Michael H. Shuman, GOING LOCAL: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age, The Free Press, 1998. "Going Local" enables us to drag our feet against the tendency of Taker globalization, which destroys cultural diversity.and reduces us all to cogs in a giant money-making machine. The nearly 70-page appendix of resources makes the book worth owning all by itself. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Janine M. Benyus, BIOMIMICRY: Innovation Inspired by Nature, William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1998. I think reviewers praise this not because they like the book but because they like the subject. I too am fascinated by the subject, but found the book to be an unrevealing look at it. Why put it on my recommended list? Because I haven’t seen anything better and because people ask what I think of it. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Ray C. Anderson, Mid-Course Correction: Towards a Sustainable Enterprise; The INTERFACE Model. Peregrinzilla Press, 1998. Distributed by Chelsea Green Pub. Co. (800-639-4099). -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Michael Maren, The Road To Hell: The Ravaging Effects Of Foreign Aid And International Charity, Simon & Schuster, 1997. If you think your charitable giving is making the Third World a better place, think again. If you think your government is trying to do good, think again. If you think the UN has been intervening in places like Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia for humanitarian reasons, think again. -- DQ -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
Gita Mehta, Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East, Fawcett Books, 1991. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
Dietrich Dörner, The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations, Perseus Books, 1996. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
Edward Tenner, Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The Americas Through Indian Eyes Since 1492, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Richard Dawkins,The Selfish Gene; Oxford Univ. Press, 1990. A wonderful introduction to the theory of natural selection and how it leads to evolutionary change. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization (as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State) Penguin , 1991. A different sort of history, exploring issues central to Ishmael. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- John Gowdy, editor. Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. $27.00 from Island Press, available soon. Comment: For more than 99% of our history, human life has meant hunting-gathering life. If you want to know how this life worked, you can spend two or three years intensively browsing the anthropology shelves of your local library—or you can read Limited Wants, Unlimited Means: A Reader on Hunter-Gatherer Economics and the Environment. John Gowdy's book is a treasure, and I recommend it without reservation to all who want to know more about this tragically-neglected subject. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Marvin Harris, Cows, Pigs, War and Witches, Vintage Books, 1974, and Cannibals and Kings, Vintage Books, 1977. A distinguished anthropologist examines aspects of culture in a highly readable and accessible form. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, HarperCollins, 1994. An important and influential study of sustainability issues. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost (Classics in Human Development) , Addison/Wesley, 1986. This book, almost a companion piece to Ishmael, shows why Leaver children grow up sane and healthy. Visit the Continuum Concept website! -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Farley Mowat, People of the Deer; Amereon Ltd., 1985. An intimate study of a Leaver people, the Ihalmiut, living in the Great Barrens of Canada. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday, 1994. An introduction to systems thinking (of which Ishmael is an example). A fairly demanding book, but the only one of its kind. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Jack Weatherford, Native Roots: How the Indians Enriched America, Fawcett, 1992. A treasure house of little known information. -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Marshall Sahlins: Stone Age Economics, Aldine de Gruyter, 1972. The classic study of "The Original Affluent Society." -- Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
- Doug Brown: Insatiable Is Not Sustainable If humans are going to have a future on this planet, a blaze of change has to sweep the earth in the next few decades--a change in the way people think about the world and our place in it. One of the sparks that are going to kindle this blaze is Doug Brown's Insatiable Is Not Sustainable, a book that reaches deep into the mad recesses of our culture (while retaining a sense of humor and remaining delightfully readable). - Buy it from Amazon.com or, you can buy it from BookSense.com
163 - Of congratulation we award ourselves for our humanitarian greatness in the Third World: "A versatile mind might want to scrutinize with an ecologically-minded eye the greatness of our great white jungle doctors. A truly modern mind that thinks also with a third eye placed generations away might then note that this humanitarian greatness nicely exploding our population there can ultimately cast a great shadow over the flora and fauna of the jungle and stop its people from singing and dancing."
New Tribal Ventures
At the New Tribal Ventures market you can find books, posters, video tapes, and other items that are no longer available in stores or that have never been available in stores. Hardcover editions of Ishmael and some of Daniel's other work can be found here—and some can be autographed to you personally. You'll also find a link to a special site we call the New Tribal Ventures Annex, which is operated by a separate host and which provides items we cannot stock, like t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, sweathirts, and other fun stuff. Click here to check it all out.Visit your local bookstore
We know that many of you prefer the "hands-on" experience of browsing and buying in your local bookstore to ordering from any website, and we, of course support "going local." If that's your preference, just call your local bookstore and see if they have in stock the Quinn title you want (or any of the other titles listed here). If they don't, they'll undoubtedly be glad to order it for you. (That's their stock-in-trade after all—customer service.) A word of caution—if they look up a book in the computer and come back to tell you it's "out of print" ask them to check a different edition (especially if it's a Quinn book). Indeed, some hardcover editions of Quinn books are out of print, but the paperbacks are all in print.How to order books and tapes from BookSense.com
This website is an affiliate of BookSense, the website for the Independent Booksellers Association. When you order a book, a small percentage is returned to us to help keep this website up and running. Ordering through BookSense gives you two options—you supply your zip code and city and book preference information and you'll be given the name of the independent bookstore nearest you that has the book in stock. Then you can either ask that it be held in the store for you to pick up or you can order it through the website and have it mailed to you.How to order books and tapes from Amazon.com
While we support and recommend buying books from your local bookstore, we know this isn't always possible. In that case, you can still help support this website, which gets a small commission on books purchased through Amazon.com or BarnesAndNoble.com via the Ishmael Community. (That is, if you start your order from the link on this site, whether you order books on this list, music, videos, or anything else they have to offer, the Ishmael Community will benefit. Generally speaking, we prefer Amazon.com to BarnesAndNoble.com). Ordering is easy. Just click on any of the books shown below, and the links will take you there. Of course, you're not obligated to buy anything. Dan has written several books, all of which are available at your local book store or at Amazon.com (the links below will take you there, but you are not obligated to buy anything). | Daniel Quinn, If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways - Daniel answers the question "How do you arrive at the strange ideas you have?" | |
| Daniel Quinn, Work Work Work - The story of an industrious mole whose life-work is to burrow from dawn to dusk across an enchanted land that he never sees. Not Quinn's first children's book, but his first in a long, long time! |  | |
 | Daniel Quinn, Tales of Adam - Abel learns from his father to act as a creature who belongs to nature, which is another way of saying he belongs in the hands of God. This is an alluring prospect, and the tales, which have the charming solemnity of the literary folk tale, never degenerate into mere cuteness or triteness." - Austin American-Statesman | |
| Daniel Quinn, The Holy "An electrifying, provocative, and dryly amusing thriller with cosmic dimensions." -- Booklist |  | |
 | NEW PAPERBACK EDITION! Daniel Quinn, After Dachau - "A ghostly and subtle thriller/fantasia/parable about (more or less) how we conceive of history, identity, time. Think Brave New World."-Esquire | |
| Daniel Quinn, Tim Eldred (Illustrator), The Man Who Grew Young |  | |
 | Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure -- Finally, he has done it...a non-fiction "guide" to "What to do?" Now available in trade paperback from Three Rivers Press (an imprint of Random House) | |
| Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael -- Unbeknownst to the narrator of Ishmael, a second pupil responded to the ad in the paper ("Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world") -- twelve-year-old Julie Gerchak, whose interaction with Ishmael results in a dialogue strikingly different from the one found in Ishmael... (Here is the German version if you need that...or are you in England?) |  | |
 | Daniel Quinn, The Story of B -- if Ishmael got you thinking, this one will shake your belief's to their foundations! | |
| Daniel Quinn, Ishmael -- the one that started it all! |  | |
 | Daniel Quinn, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest -- For an Ishmael enthusiast, this is a must read. In this book we see the genesis of the radical ideas that would later surface in Ishmael...coming together like pieces in a puzzle. |
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To order any books from Amazon.com use the icon to the left to get there...when you start from this website, you will be giving providing much needed help to this website.
If you'd like to buy books from booksellers who operate homebased businesses or take a more personal interest in their products and customers (and who have been long-time "friends of Ishmael"), here are a few. When you order from them, tell them we sent you.
Donnelly/Colt
Box 188, Hampton, CT 06247
FAX 1-800-553-0006
860-455-9621
Clay Colt and his wife Kate Donnelly have a huge catalogue of posters, buttons, and other items for teachers (and others, of course).They offer Daniel's books in paperback. You can get a 20% discount on orders of 10 or more copies of Ishmael or other titles, though they may have to be specially ordered, since they just keep a small inventory on hand.
Randy's Books
PO Box 214
Akron, PA 17501
Website: www.randysbooks.com
Email: randy@randysbooks.com
Randy Newcomer has a "day job" and once had a small bookstore that got eaten up by a chain. So now he operates strictly by mail, specializing in books about nature and the environment. Randy offers discounts on from 1 to many copies.
Chinaberry Book Service
2780 Via Orange Way, Suite B
Spring Valley, CA 91978
1-800-776-2242 (6 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Sat. Pacific Time)
Many of you already know the Chinaberry Catalogue, which specializes in
family-oriented books for children and adults. The company has grown from
it's
beginnings in Ann Ruethling's home, but she still reads all the books that
make
it into the pages of the catalogue.
Daniel Quinn's Annotated List of Suggested Readings
Here are a few items to get you started. There are lots of others that contributed to the development of the ideas in the novels you mention -- a lifetime's worth. In support of the notion of "going local," we strongly urge readers, whenever possible, to buy recommended books from their LOCAL booksellers...BUT, if you are going to use Amazon.com -- use the links below! (The Ishmael Community website gets a small referral fee that helps offset the cost of running this site.) The hot links below will take you to Amazon.com Bookstore where you can learn more about these books (and lots of others). You will not be asked to buy anything...but you can if you want to.