When I finished reading
Ishmael, I actually broke down and wept - with relief, with affirmation, and with
real hope. For the first time in my life it felt as though the many pieces of the puzzle of human history had finally been put together into a picture that made sense of everything, and thus suggested a way out of the labyrinth; it gave new meaning to the possibility of
"waking up from the nightmare of history" (to paraphrase
Joyce). It was like the antidote to the poison that our culture had been slowly dosing me with since I was born. The poison was a mixture of lies and complacency born of hopelessness....
If you are interested in finding out how things got to be this way; how humans came to be the enemy of life on earth; the lies we tell ourselves; and why we can't seem to stop ourselves destroying the world, then I urge you to set aside for now the misinterpretation of Daniel Quinn's work given above by teleny, and read the Ishmael trilogy and Beyond Civilization, to see for yourself exactly what is being offered.
I also highly recommend the Ishmael website at http://www.ishmael.org/ as an excellent resource; the speeches available online are a good introduction (http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/), and the Questions & Answers page is also a good way to get a clearer understanding of what's being said in these books.