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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.
"One of the central arguments presented in Some Family is that there are four basic genealogical forms. The supporting evidence runs from the Solomon Islands to classical China to ancient Ireland. Highly significant on its own, this evidence also provides the information needed to assess the Latter-day Saints' effort to provide a single narrative on how humanity keeps track of itself." --Résumé de l'éditeur.
This book is the product of Donald Akenson's decades of research and writing on Irish social history and its relationship to the Irish diaspora - it is also the product of a lifetime of trying to figure out where Swedish-America actually came from, and why. These two matters, Akenson shows, are intimately related. Ireland and Sweden each provide a tight case study of a larger phenomenon, one that, for better or worse, shaped the modern world: the Great European Diaspora of the "true" nineteenth century. Akenson's book parts company with the great bulk of recent emigration research by employing sharp transnational comparisons and by situating the two case studies in the larger context of the ...
The grace of fiction combined with the power of history
'Some of these stories are accurate; all of them are true.'
"During the nineteeth and early twentieth centuries Ireland had a proportionately greater out-migration than did any other European nation...Irish persons made up large proportions of the populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States."--book jacket.
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.
Akenson brings to light critical similarities among three politically troubled nations: South Africa, Israel, and Northern Ireland.
Offers a lively and provocative account of what we can learn about Jesus by reading the letters of Paul, providing fresh new insights into both Jesus and Paul. The author painstakingly recreates the world of Christ, a time rich with ideas, prophets, factions, priests, savants and god-drunk fanatics. He insistently stresses throughout the Jewishness of Jesus (e.g., referring to Jesus and Paul as Yeshua and Saul, as they were then known). Equally important, he dismisses the traditional method of searching for facts about Jesus by looking for parallels among the four Gospels; they were handed down to us as a unit by a later generation, he argues. Saul, although he did not know Yeshua personally, knew his most important followers and wrote immediately after Yeshua's death. His teachings were approved (though sometimes reluctantly) by Yeshua's brothers and other early leaders.
Montserrat, although part of England's empire, was settled largely by the Irish and provides an opportunity to view the interaction of Irish emigrants with English imperialism in a situation where the Irish were not a small minority among white settlers. Within this context Akenson explores whether Irish imperialism on Montserrat differed from English imperialism in other colonies. Akenson reveals that the Irish proved to be as effective and as unfeeling colonists as the English and the Scottish, despite the long history of oppression in Ireland. He debunks the myth of the "nice" slave holder and the view that indentured labour prevailed in the West Indies in the seventeenth century. He also shows that the long-held habit of ignoring ethnic strife within the white ruling classes in the West Indies is misconceived. If the Irish Ran the World provides interesting insights into whether ethnicity was central to the making of the colonial world and the usefulness of studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English imperialism in the Americas. It will be the basis of the Joanne Goodman Lectures at the University of Western Ontario in 1997.