"The grace of fiction combined with the power of history," is how the
two-volume set of "An Irish History of Civilization" is described at
the publisher's website, McGill-Queens University Press:

http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1777

The Irish Times book review excerpt: "It is great fun, terrifically written
and down to earth: scholarship and the Irish diaspora as you have
never seen them before."

Canada's "Globe and Mail" says this:

"Historian Don Akenson's monumental work begins with Paul in 16 BC and
ends with the Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1970:
Billy Graham and Richard Nixon. What's between requires four books in
two volumes, divided into chapters on particular places and periods,
themselves divided into nurmereous brief stories, each with its own
point. Iconoclastic, original and eclectic, Akenson has produced a
unique opus that is absorbing and entertaining, sometimes exhilarating
and occasionally exhausting. The sheer vitality and mulitiplicity of
these thousand and one stories produces a cumulative richness of
imagery and narrative unmatched in much conventional fiction. It is an
extraordinary feat of writing."
Peter Hart Globe & Mail

More from the publisher's website:

History is our true novel, says Roy Foster, Ireland's leading
historian. In An Irish History of Civilization, the world's foremost
scholar of the Irish diaspora, Don Akenson, fuses history and fiction
into an iconoclastic narrative of a people and their influence around
the globe.

In a sprawling chronicle of civilization through Irish eyes, Akenson
takes us from St Patrick to Woodie Guthrie, from Constantine to John
F. Kennedy, from India to the Australian outback. In two volumes of
masterful storytelling he creates ironic, playful, and acerbic
historical miniatures - a quixotic series of reconstructions woven
into a helix in which the same historical figures reappear in
radically different contexts as their narratives intersect with the
larger picture.

An Irish History of Civilization is about the Irish at home and
abroad, the great and the small, the noble and the depraved, the wise
and the foolish. In vignettes of Irish misery, triumph, folly, and
glory, Akenson weaves artful fictions - his hilarious portrait of
Victorian Canadian icon Susannnah Moodie, for instance, will outlive a
hundred solemn monographs on her literary life and his tales of Irish
Protestants and Catholics will leave no doubt about their impact on
American life.

Like the archetypal stories in the Talmuds, Akenson's model, the
stories in An Irish History of Civilization are universal for big
truths require a big canvas. He follows his chosen peoples on their
odyssey around the globe in a story like no other, the lines between
history and fiction irretrievably lost in the mists of Irish time.

VOLUME 1 takes Irish civilization from its Semitic roots in early
Christianity to St Patrick to early Irish conquests in Europe and
several New Worlds, and from the eighteenth-century penal laws to the
emergence of Irish Catholics as energetic imperializers within the
First and Second British Empires.

VOLUME 2 begins with the Great Famine and moves on to show the Irish
adapting, improvising, and innovating in Ireland, North America, New
Zealand, Australia, Polynesia, and South Africa. Akenson ends by
demonstrating conclusively the centrality of both Catholic and
Protestant Irish culture to the United States.

>>>

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Don Akenson is considered the world's foremost scholar of the Irish
diaspora. He is the author of eleven books including God's Peoples for
which he won the world's richest non-fiction prize, the Grawemeyer
Award, in the category of improving humanity. He is also a past
recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Akenson teaches history at
Queen's University, Ontario, and is Honorary Professor of Irish and
Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He was Beamish
Research Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool
from 1997 to 2004. Currently he lives in Kingston, Ontario.


An Irish History of Civilization
Don Akenson
McGill-Queen's University Press
Publication Date: March 2006
Volume 1: $34.95 ISBN: 0-7735-2890-3
Volume 2: $34.95 ISBN: 0-7735-2891-1

http://www.mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=1777

Be sure to check out the great reviews linked to from that site! :-)