Ishmael Book Review By Thomas Van

Ishmael is a 4.1 out of 5 star book as rated on Amazon. It features a telepathic ape with Socrates type knowledge. The plot is intriguing and the Apes story is further intriguing but I found that the main character (the one the Ape teaches) was rather annoying.

Many times throughout the book you can’t understand why he responded to the advertisement or agreed to become the student of Ishmael because he seems a bit slow. Most of the questions he asks makes you want to punch him in the face as he ties up and slows down the progression of Ishmael’s story.

I would have much rather had the main character be able to figure more stuff out on his own and think intelligently like he was actually interested in or belonged in the book. However, in many more pages than necessary the message did come across.

The view of the book is very unique and the approach the author took to explain it I found fascinating. Oddly enough, the biggest thing I took from the book was the authors theory on world hunger and starvation.

Portrayed as a population check to naturally avoid over crowding it seems innate that people will starve and they will die. The fight against world hunger has us producing more and more food yet millions people still starve no matter how much food we produce.

The reason behind this is every time you feed a starving population they reproduce making it so there are always too many people to feed and not enough resources. When we produced enough food globally to feed 4 billion we had 4.5 billion when we reached 4.5 billion we had 5 billion people when we produced enough for 6 billion we had 6.5 billion people.

The population always grows when food production grows, therefore, millions will starve and continue to starve until reproduction is stunted along while the food supply grows.