My second year of college I was selected as a Ford Apprentice Scholar through a Ford Foundation grant that allows select institutions to pluck young minds out of the undergraduate morass and start molding them for academia. We were each sponsored by a professor in our field, and for two years our cohort met for three hours once a week in the President's conference room to discuss the life of the mind. At 19, of course, I had very little awareness of the world beyond Pinellas County, Florida, and neither did most of my cohort. So during the first year of the program, we read a book a week, starting with Boethius and going all the way through Hawking. We studied rhetoric and philosophy and many histories.

The book that had the greatest impact on me that year - indeed, the book that set me on my current path - was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. It's difficult to give a synopsis of the book's "plot" without sounding silly, as it's really allegory. This book was the first crack in the positivist mold by mind had been formed (followed, later, by The Chalice and the Blade and other foundational texts in the canon of this new world we are creating).

I've read Ishmael a number of times in the decade since I first encountered it. It's not a perfect book, either in conception or execution. But I continue to give a copy to every person I know who is trying to break out of the cocoon of modernity. It is accessible at a level more scholarly works are not; it is engaging; and it invites the reader to see the world through a new lens, and then go out and do something about what they see.