The Zoo Where You're Fed to God

What a pleasant surprise. Great writing, powerful images and thoughts. At one point, the main character begins to slip into insanity. He starts to regain his emotional footing when he decides he just doesn't give a damn whether he's nuts or not. Wow.The writing is crisp, the character is both tortured and honest -- you sometimes feel you're inside his head as he struggles with inner voices, nihilism, loneliness, confusion. To Ventura's credit, the book also stays true to the character, and doesn't betray his basic decency at any point. This is a great book.

ventura has opened my chest and massaged my heart while also opening my skull and exciting my mind..this ranks as one of the best books ive read in the past decade..on my second journey through it now..may not be for everyone but its not only for middleaged complex men who think,wonder,question,ache and search..i love this book..try it...the viewpoint is original,interesting,helpful,truthful,beautiful

This man is absolutly brilliant and his brain is an enigma to most all of our modern mindsets. If you want to peek into a still water image of the path western culture is marching, reading this book will most definatly begin the process. This is not a book that will sing you to sleep, and dont expect to ever, EVER look at the zoo the same agian. Mr.Micheal is a teacher at my school, though "teacher" dosent correctly capture his function from 8 to 10 am, in our 16 year old lives. As a person who has been privledged enough to converse with the man representing this complex and truthful perspective on the world we share, i advise all of you strongly on this book. Although don't expect to find any kind of instint gratification, the man dosent know how to spoon feed. enjoy the clarity.

We need a story about our fucked-up western lives. We need to find a way through them, to begin an initiation into a reality that makes sense to our souls. Michael Ventura's "The Zoo Where You're Fed to God" is about finding a way -- here, today, in America -- toward our souls. Michael Ventura writes prose like images write dreams. Dream Images are not afraid to be dark and neither is this story. It takes us into the dark places we avoid in our culture -- at a high price -- and yet these are the places that we long for -- we dream about -- we cannot live without -- and when we are in them we are closer to life. The story is not about details -- don't get stuck in the surface of the story -- but uses its efficient detail to mark the doorways to the American myths of these times. We see young love on our TVs and in our movies and in our stories and we let it stay young without allowing it -- and ourselves -- to mature and express the soul as love-making does in other cultures (at least in old -- very old -- ones). The images of the act of sex in our culture reflect the shallowness of our culture that cannot get beyond the adolescent ideas about the body. This story gives us an example of a soul-full love and it does it through a strong presentation that leaves behind the stereotypes and shallowness that come with reading a story only on the surface. 'Sexual stereotypes' is only one of our dark myths Michael Ventura explores. He also takes us through 'the family' and 'the nature of the city' and 'relationships.' The nice thing about reading this story is falling into these dark myths and seeing the light as the crazy part and then coming out wonderfully light.