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If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways. By Daniel Quinn ( Steerforth )
Release Date: 2007-01-02
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List Price: $13.95
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Product Description
In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn offered new ways of seeing and understanding human history, and our collective future. His message was transformative for millions of people, and Ishmael continues to attract tens of thousands of new readers each year. Subsequent works, such as The Story of B and My Ishmael, expanded upon his insights and teachings, but only now does he finally tackle the one question he has been asked hundreds of times but has never taken on: "How do you do what you do?" In If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways Quinn elucidates for readers the methods behind his own thought processes, challenging and ultimately empowering them to view the world for themselves in creative, perhaps even revolutionary ways.
If They Give You Lines Paper, Write Sideways also includes Quinn's never-before-published essays "The New Renaissance" and "Our Religions." There is a scientific consensus that global warming is approaching a tipping point beyond no return faster than had previously been predicted. Quinn has long portrayed humans as "a species of beings, which, while supposedly rational, are destroying the very planet they live on." So what are we to do? There has never been a plan for the future - and there never will be. But something extraordinary will happen in the next two or three decades; the people of our culture will learn to live sustainably - or not. Either way, it will be extraordinary. The sooner we understand this reality, the greater the chances that human society will transform itself so that the human race might have a future.
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 Disappointing... ( chesterrush )
I agree that critical thinking is something that is lacking in our society and our public schools' curricula, but this book is unlikely to inspire you to think more critically. Read Ishmael or The Story of B instead.
Quinn's interviewer in this book, Elaine, struggles to keep up with him as he leads her through his line of questioning. It was probably a very educational experience for her, but at times reading the transcript borders on tedium. Even Quinn seems to get frustrated a few times. There's a lot of redundancy as they often restate each other's questions and answers. The book never really goes anywhere. I didn't get much out of it.
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 Another Good Book ( daverndv )
Another great book from D. Quinn. Learn a great deal from his writings and about what it takes to make a difference, a real difference. Perfect for our troubled times. Thanks, and keep being a martian anthropologist, it's a great perspective.
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Following Desmond Morris Steps ( pkx )
Morris has just produced The Naked Man, a companion book to The Naked Woman, which appeared in 2004, and the latest in an evolutionary line stretching back to his career-defining, life-changing, collective-mentality-altering The Naked Ape, an instant bestseller when it was published in 1967 and now heading for sales of 20m. He has made a career out of telling us that 10,000 years of "civilisation" cannot offset several million years of hunter-gathering, and that we now live a life that is, in many ways, at odds with our genetic inheritance. The Naked Man exemplifies the tensions - and the pleasures - in Morris's richly varied career. The book is a long way from The Reproductive Behaviour of the Ten-Spined Stickleback, for which he was awarded his doctorate at Oxford in 1954. He could have had a distinguished career as what might be called an institutionalised zoologist - and for much of his time he has had exactly that - but in the late 1950s he fell among that dangerous tribe of television people, joining Granada to make the programme Zoo Time, which taught him how to popularise without dumbing down too much, made him a name and led to him writing The Naked Ape, which treated humans as animals and sought to explain all human behaviour in zoological terms. Man was not a moral or a spiritual being; he was an animal, an ape with pretensions to be something greater. "I spent the first half of my life studying animal behaviour," says Morris, "and when I eventually wrote a book about human beings, I wrote about them as if I was writing about another animal species. I had met Tom Maschler, then a young publisher at Cape, at a party and told him I was going to write a zoology of human beings one day, and not even use the term human beings. Instead I'd write it as if I was an alien who had come to this planet and seen this extraordinary ape which doesn't have any fur on its body. Tom loved the idea, but it took him three years to persuade me to write it, and when I eventually set to work I had to complete it in four weeks because I was so busy. I just sat down and wrote. It was written with such intensity that I can remember it to this day."
Sound Familiar ? . I give 4 stars for his Appedixes . Otherwise , just okey, more of the same . And the above was copied without permission from Tuesday December 18, 2007
The Guardian. Thanks .
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 Another Excellent Daniel Quinn Book ( pyefeld )
I think this was my 6th or 7th Daniel Quinn book and I found it to be very helpful, entertaining, and enlightening. It is very helpful to be sort of "walked through" his thinking process, and I think about this book often.
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Writing sidelines
I read 'If they give you lined paper write sideways' after 'Ishmael' and 'My Ishmael'. So I was a bit overfed by Daniel Quinn's ideas. And 'If they give you...' was a great summary of all his theories and concepts. Stylistically, I think that interview format best suits for introducing Quinn's ideas, as it is not a great literature in terms of language and stylistics, his books are more exciting for his ideas.
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