Deven Jackson
SSR Book Project
10th Grade Honors Lit
Mrs. Gilmer
Response to Ishmael
For my first SSR book project, I chose to read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Overall, I found that Ishmael was a very good book. It was the story of a man who is discontent with his life and is trying to find out how he can change the world in which we live. Reading this book has taught me a lot about myself, the people around me and most importantly, the world we live in.
To me, the basic idea of Ishmael is that humans began to think that the world belonged to them around the time of the agricultural revolution and that humans began to think that Earth belonged to them. As I started to read this book, I thought that the ideas were not practical but as I read on, I began to believe what I was reading. I think that Quinn did an excellent job in the way he put his ideas into this book. This is one book that I felt I could truly relate to and understood well.
The biggest thing that this book has added to my life is helping me to understand that humans are destroying the world we live in. At first I thought this idea was crazy, but it made sense later. I started to relate to what Ishmael thought, which is that humans believe that Earth is their possession and that they can do whatever they like with it if it is beneficial to them. At first the pursuit of this dream wasn’t looking so bad, but it developed into what the world is today, a mess that was on the verge on disaster! It helped me to understand that the only thing most humans care about is themselves, even it what they are doing to help themselves affects others. I believe this can be applied to the world now because every human does something to harm the world. For example: cars polluting the atmosphere, people cutting down forests, and the people shoving away the other peoples in the world if they are “inferior”. Now, the idea that humans are destroying the world is very relevant and is something that I...