The Story of B

Rating:
Summary: Every human being MUST read this book!
Review: A dear friend of mine pushed this book into my hands two nights ago and ordered me to read it. Now I am telling everyone to read this also. It's a fast-paced conspiracy novel with marvelous character development - and it outlines a new worldview, a new vision that is shockingly simple. Several times throughout I had to put the book down and just THINK, my mind was so over-loaded with what I was reading. I find myself asking questions about our culture that I would never, ever have thought to ask before. A compelling philosophy, challenging our assumptions about history, religion, evolutionary theory, anthropology, sociology, crime, industry, and politics. Even if you are POSITIVE you won't agree with what you may read, read it anyway. What a fantastic puzzle to solve!

Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Journey
Review: I hate to be typical and follow the crowd, but I found "The Story of B" to be an incredible take of the evolution of civilization, on religion, and on social change. It has changed the way I perceive the world around me and the positions I take in everything. Research into the areas introduced in this novel prove that Quinn is correct in most of his ideas. Readers of Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" will recognise key theories set up by Ishmael and Alan Lomax, but new ideas and history are introduced to give an even clearer picture of how and why the human race is hurdling ahead to eventual destruction, as well as what we can do to save it and make *all* of its inhabitants happier.

Jared is a priest who is sent to Europe to scope out a man who is whispered to be the Antichrist. He finds B, but is immediately drawn into his theories. The lectures are facinating, if a bit on the dry side, and are well placed within the story to keep the plot line moving. They also set up information and ideas for "My Ishmael," the next book in the trilogy. I found "The Story of B" to be the most enthralling of the three, however, with some of the most poingant moments in the series.

Rating:
Summary: Is there anything lower than a 1 star?
Review: For all his ranting about the environment and how we are wasting it, Quinn sure didn't have any problems using countless trees to excrete his drivel. The back of the book should have been warning enough: "B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes, opening up a spiritual direction for humanity that would have been unimaginable to and of the saviors of traditional religion...blah blah."

Quinn is an author who desperately wants to be known for thought-provoking prose, adult anarchy and thinking light-years ahead of his generation. Unfortunately, his writing is elementary at best, his "fresh ideas" are mere common sense anyone with a mind has already considered, and to say he is borrowing from Voltaire and Confucious would be a compliment.

Quinn says he hopes to make all question their "most cherished beliefs." What he has failed to realize throughout his sophomoric attempts to address humanity, post-modernism and culture - is that these ideas are something we have ALL thought through, at one time or another, and their rejection or acceptance has LED us to our current beliefs. You are teaching us nothing new, dear boy, and your book can be summed up in Solomon's words as "Vanity. Nothing new under the sun."

Rating:
Summary: We are in earnest, and we will save the world!
Review: I've read each of Daniel Quinn's new tribal novels, being the Ishmael trilogy and Beyond Civilization, and though my life has been changed drastically by them (as have many), The Story of B had the greatest impact. I struggled all my life with organized religion, unable to find any reason to put any stock in religious dogma. When I read TSOB, I found in it a different religion, one that didn't require blind faith, one without obscure, nebulous dogma. Aside from steering me on a course toward saving the world (which is substantial in its own right), TSOB did something for me on a far more personal level: it gave me something to believe in, something that could give this destructive, consumptive life an iota of meaning. I'm a professing animist now, and proud to call myself the Antichrist. That's right. Don't let that scare you, though, it's not what you think. Read the book, taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Then you'll understand.

Rating:
Summary: Imperitive to Read This Book
Review: I read Ishmael, and My Ishmael (both by the same author) and I found that for effectiveness, this book was much better. The book does leave out much of the evidence it needs to make it truely believeable, and the way it leads the reader on is reminiscent of the Age of Reason (during which philosophers of that time came to a lot of strange conclusions), but even so, it leaves the reader questioning everything they've been instructed to believe over the course of our culture's existance. Even if the reader doesn't entirely (or even mostly) agree with the conclusions the book presents, the book gives the reader a way to choose something other than what "Mother Culture" feeds us. It creates a very good angle on humanity, presents a powerfully convincing reason to change for the better, and gives hope that the change is indeed possible. Friends of mine are slowly basing their spiritual philosophies on Quinn's suggestions with positive results.

However, DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF YOU HAVE AND VALUE A CHRISTIAN UPBRINGING, BECAUSE IT WILL CAUSE YOU TO QUESTION EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER THOUGHT.

In short, I loved this book. It changed the path of my life.

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading
Review: If you're the average uninformed American who is smart enough to question media hype but still takes the evening news at face value, who votes every year but hasn't heard of half the candidates on the ballot, who laughs at comic strips depicting environmentalists as tree-huggers, then reading this book is a good idea: you're who the author was aiming for. Daniel Quinn, with this and his other novels, is attempting to bring to light problems with Western civilization in a way that can be absorbed by those not in the intellectual/cynical community. Although the writing is at times sub par and Daniel Quinn will never be the world's greatest storyteller, the message is an important one to at least glance at; it asks (rather than forces) you to question your assumptions about our world and the way we think. The writing isn't fabulous and doesn't need to be: the ideas contained in this novel will be absorbed whether the writing is phenomenal or simply better than average.

If you're a cynic or someone who prides themselves on being part of the informed, intellectual community and are already very aware of the problems, arguments and ideas surrounding the collapse of Western civilization, you can safely skip this book. If you read it anyway and bashed it, shame on you: you know this wasn't written for you.

Rating:
Summary: Great look at history and a hopeful promise to the future.
Review: The Story of B is what could be called the middle book of Daniel Quinn's trilogy about the thoughts and influences of the talking gorilla known as Ishmael.

Unlike Ishmael or My Ishmael ("A Sequel" to Ishmael, though the third in the series), the gorilla is not present and the story focuses on one of Ishmael's proteges. A man commonly called "B". Romping through Europe, tracked and confronted by the narrator (who's diary we are purportedly reading) who is investigating him to see if B is potentially the Antichrist (a theory far less fantastical than one would think), it is a very compelling read.

Certain portions of the novel appear as endnotes, transcriptions the narrator has made of B's speeches and should be read not at the end of the book, but as the story progresses. It is these ideas, the speeches of B, which Quinn uses as the foundation for the message he is trying to convey in both this book and his two Ishmael books. The very simplified gist of it is that our -- humanity's -- view of the world and history is dangerously askew. We, all of us, have forgotten a crucial step in our timeline when humans went from content, tribal, happy people to over-worked, "civilized", and confused people. From gathering and hunting for a few hours a day and living with tribes, to farming or working twelve hours a day and living in massive cities. From there, B and his followers take the narrator and the reader on an adventure to explore this rift in our collective history and to see how it affects everything we are. Ultimately the problem remains that this lifestyle, the one adopted with the advent of "The Great Forgetting", will destroy us all. Everything in the world is at risk of the pains of our progress.

I must admit the novel does a far better job explaining and detailing this than I have just done. It is a very smooth and engaging read. Only bogging down in one over-long scene in a park that I still think could have been fleshed out better. But that is a trifle matter in a very engaging and extremely thought-provoking work. The plot dovetails nicely with the Socratic dialogues that are at the core of the message. In the end the story leaves the reader maybe as a convert, maybe as an activist, and maybe not, but at least carrying an idea in their mind that cannot be shaken free.

Rating:
Summary: Eh...
Review: Daniel Quinn obviously has an important message to relay, because we ARE destroying and overpopulating the world, but he's not the best at portraying anything in fiction. This book is VERY important, but anyone who reads it MUST be careful to be a filter, not a sponge. Also, you have to read the speeches as you're reading the book, or else you won't even know what B is teaching- what the book is about.

Rating:
Summary: Passable, not vision-changing
Review: I found The Story of B for $1.00 at my local discount store. (I should mention, however, that I did not get into Quinn by reading Ishmael or any of its sequels and am not a member of any of the Ishmael/Quinn societies that are cropping up all over the country. I am simply a reader of books who found one that he liked and wants to tell people about it.)

It turned out to be quite the page-turner, but not in the way you might think. We're not talking about The DaVinci Code, here, merely a book that I retained interest in from the beginning to the end--enough so that I didn't even mind being shuffled back and forth in the book to read the speeches made by "B" (as the title character is known), having to use two bookmarks in the process, something I haven't done since I read Infinite Jest.

Jared Osborne, a priest who is slowly progressing through his idea of the "50 steps of losing one's faith," has been sent to investigate a man named Charles Atterley (aka "B"), a public speaker with a large following, to see if he suits the criteria they have predetermined to be the Antichrist. Yes, I know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you're not a Christian. Along the way, Jared listens to the speeches made by Atterley and becomes his chosen apprentice. These concepts are earth-shattering at the same time they are potentially earth-healing.

The Story of B is actually less a novel than a fictional Socratic dialogue between "B" (so named because of his practice of, like the "A" of Adultery in The Scarlet Letter, of Blasphemy) in his various manifestations and Jared, the lapsing priest. The arguments are presented convincingly and they just may be true, but I'm not sure that this book is going to change anyone's "vision" the way it would like. To me, it was simply a passable entertainment that filled time efficiently.

Rating:
Summary: Great material, in need of a better author.
Review: I enjoyed the book tremendously, and had difficulty putting it down once I started. That said, I can't help but be a bit disappointed at the end. I kept turning pages expecting ideas worthy of blasphemy. Instead, I found fairly unthreatening ideas about man's relationship to the rest of the universe.

Of course we are no different from the other animals. Of course we are destroying the world. Of course we have to change the way we live. I guess I expected something more profound.

Still, worth reading, and even occasionally thought provoking.