Since Daniel Quinn's books are copyrighted, the ideas in them can only be distributed freely if they are written in a different form. Don Neeper had the idea of writing an essay summarizing the ideas in Ishmael and sending it by email to people he feels might appreciate it. The essays he has written reword Ishmael's and B's thoughts clearly and concisely (Quinn himself has praised his efforts) and are public domain, free to be copied and distributed. Read his three essays below. You can also read them at his website or at his Themestream page. Also check out A Parable for our times, a parable about population and food, and Neighborhoods vs. Sprawl, his "open letter to architects and real estate developers".

Hope for the Future summarizes the main points of Quinn's ideas, including discussion of the birth of totalitarian agriculture and the problems of our culture today.

Shadows of Our Past explains Quinn's theories about the affects of hunting and storytelling on human evolution, from The Story of B.

The Inverse of Law is a somewhat more original essay describing a hypothetical kind of law that would be able to evolve to work under changing conditions, much as genes do.

Don Neeper is a software engineer at SofTechnics and can be contacted at b-leaver@usa.net.