In telling a wide range of stories about the Irish everywhere, this historical-fictional account of the Irish people around the world from the time of Christ to 1969 open up the really big issues - the relationship between the minute particulars and the larger patterns which gradually become apparent.

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...

In telling a wide range of stories about the Irish everywhere, this historical-fictional account of the Irish people around the world from the time of Christ to 1969 opens up the really big issues - the relationship between the minute particulars and the larger patterns which gradually become apparent.

In telling a wide range of stories about the Irish everywhere, this historical-fictional account of the Irish people around the world from the time of Christ to 1969 open up the really big issues - the relationship between the minute particulars and the larger patterns which gradually become apparent.