The narrator of this extraordinary tale is a man in search for truth. He answers an ad in a local newspaper from a teacher looking for serious pupils, only to find himself alone in an abandoned office with a full-grown gorilla who is nibbling delicately on a slender branch. "You are the teacher?" he asks incredulously. "I am the teacher," the gorilla replies. Ishmael is a creature of immense wisdom and he has a story to tell, one that no other human...

A novel on Ishmael, a gorilla-philosopher. He advertises for a pupil interested in saving the world and Julie Gerchak, 12, answers. The lessons center on the educational system, which according to Ishmael is not really doing its job.

"People are listening, Jared--possibly to something quite new. That makes it dangerous." So begins Father Jared Osborne's mission to Europe to find a peripatetic preacher whose radical message is attracting a growing circle of followers. Father Osborne is bound by a covert centuries-old mandate held by his religious order: to know before all others that the Antichrist is among us--and to try to suppress and destroy him...

Don't know who Tom Shadyac is? As a writer and a director, Shadyac first unleashed Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and The Nutty Professor remake on the world, and then a string of film fiascoes, but that's all behind him now. A bike accident left him with a host of debilitating maladies and brought him to the verge of suicide, so he took stock of his life and set out on a quest to answer some of life's greatest questions. What's wrong with the world?...