Moving in a different direction from "Ishmael" and "My Ishmael", but keeping to the same overall story, it questions what ends the establishment, here represented by a religious order, might take to suppress potentially "harmful" information.

The message is we should always keep an open mind and question the common wisdom. ( )

The third of Quinn's books I've read. What he writes makes great sense, but I'm at a loss as to how to get back to the "tribal" mentality. ( )

Intended to be read after Quinn's "Ishmael", "The Story of B" follows the same principles and ideas formally presented in "Ishamel". The major difference between the two books, is that rather than a transcribed conversation, "The Story of B" consists of an actual plot and events. The new concept introduced, also, is that of Animism. Other than this, the novel serves as a fortification of the beliefs outlined in the previous book.
I found this novel to be much more entertaining than its predecessor, but at the same time contain fewer original ideas. It seems to be a rehashing of the same "totalitarian agriculture" oratory, with the "animist" twist added. The addition of a plot line to the story allows the reader to identify much more closely with the protagonist. I also found it most helpful to read the 'diary' in conjunction with the actual story, which seemed to enhance the book's overall effect.
This is in retrospect a very informative, enjoyable, didactic read, but at the same time does justice to the original "Ishmael". The lack of new thoughts and ideas is balanced out by the entertaining plot. ( )

This was a fantastic semi-sequel to Ishmael. Having read Quinn's first novel, my thought-process had already been stirred and open to his ideas. I understood the heart of what he was saying, as well as the logistics. I craved more.

The Story of B. gave it to me. What I found in this novel was a fantastic plot that I became increasingly engaged in as it developed - something I did not have on such a scale with Ishmael. Also, I found a deepening of Quinn's perspective/theory/whatever-you-want-to-call-it throughout the novel. I loved that the teachings were left to the end of the book, so you could choose to read them in context or separately. I chose the latter, because I was so engaged with the story and felt I had a good base with the philosophy, although I did read a few of them in context. I don't regret that way of reading, because I feel I got just as much out of it and then was able to confirm and tweak a few ideas afterwards while reading the teachings more thoroughly.

All in all, this is a fantastic read -- engaging and even more thought-provoking than its precursor, Ishmael. It was hard to continue with Quinn to My Ishmael, returning to the questioning format, after such a great plot. ( )

Quinn returns to fiction after a five-year hiatus with a sequel of sorts to Ishmael, winner of the Turner Tomorrow Award in 1991. Like its controversial predecessor, this book is not really a novel, but an extended Socratic dialogue that promulgates the same animist solutions to global problems that the author recorded last year in his spiritual autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. The narrator, Jared Osborne, is a priest of the Laurentians, a fictional Roman Catholic order under an ancient, covert mandate to stand watch against the coming of the Antichrist. Although skeptical, Jared is enjoined by his superior to investigate Charles Atterley, an expatriate American preacher known to his followers as "B." Allowing Jared into his inner circle in Munich, B soon dispels both the concern that he is the Antichrist and the shivery intimations of apocalypse that make the opening chapters darkly intriguing. Through long, often numbingly repetitive parables and speeches, B instructs Jared in the solutions to overpopulation, ecological despoliation, cultural intolerance and other ills that have dogged civilization since the time of "the Great Forgetting" 10,000 years ago. B's smug pontificating and his disciples' unquestioning devotion reduces them to interchangeable mouthpieces for Quinn's philosophies. As a result, Jared's spiritual conversion away from Roman Catholicism and toward Quinn-ism, intended to be the book's dramatic high point, falls painfully flat. From Publishers Weekly ( )