At Face Value, Second Edition: The Life and Times of Eliza McCormack/John White

Literature & Fiction

Akenson, Don

Genre Fiction

McGill-Queen's University Press

<div>From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to Confederation, central Canada was awash with migrants from the British Isles and their cultural values. The raw prejudice that they brought with them - against the French, the Catholics, and even Yanks and Europeans - bound together the eventual political majority in Ontario. The Orangeman uses the life of Ogle Gowan, an Irish Protestant upstart from County Wexford who turned central Canada Orange, to explore these forces.Gowan was ambitious, malicious, and mendacious, but by the time of Confederation the Orange Order was the largest alliance of men in the country - the foundation of the coalition of conservative Protestants that sculpted Canadian politics in the century that followed. Don Akenson uses his skills as a historian and a novelist in respecting the historical record. The Orangeman is a lively and entertaining fictional biography, and in Akenson's telling Gowan crosses swords with William Lyon Mackenzie and goes pub-crawling with the young John A. Macdonald.One never knows everything about a historical person or event; sometimes the right thing to do is to speculate sensibly and, if possible, have a little fun along the way. Akenson shows us Canadian loyalism, constitutionalism, and deference to state authority on one side of the coin, and on the flip side, the successful attempt by one group of Canadians to do down the other. This is real history, real life: as yesterday, so today.</div>

The Orangeman, Second Edition: The Life and Times of Ogle Gowan, Second Edition

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

In a parish register in Ireland, Akenson discovered a record naming an Eliza McCormack White as John's sister. Employing imaginative reconstruction, he proposes that Eliza McCormack, a transvestite prostitute who was in central Canada at the time John White arrived on the Canadian scene, was actually John's sister. Further, he suggests that John White can be best understood by recognizing that he was in fact Eliza!

At Face Value: The Life and Times of Eliza McCormack/John White

Akenson, Donald Harman

United States

The assumption that Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics are fundamentally different is central to modern Irish history. There are hundreds of books and thousands of articles that either presuppose the existence of Irish Catholic-Protestant differences

Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922: An International Perspective (Volume 1) (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion)

History

Europe

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.

If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730 (Joanne Goodman Lectures, 1997.)

Americas

Akenson argues that, despite the popular conception of the Irish as a city people, those who settled in Ontario were primarily rural and small-town dwellers. Though it is often claimed that the experience of the Irish in their homeland precluded their successful settlement on the frontier in North America, Akenson's research proves that the Irish migrants to Ontario not only chose to live chiefly in the hinterlands, but that they did so with marked success. Akenson also suggests that by using Ontario as an "historical laboratory" it is possible to make valid assessments of the real differences between Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, characteristics which he contends are much more precisely measurable in the neutral environment of central Canada than in the turbulent Irish homeland. While Akenson is careful not to over-generalize his findings, he contends that the case of Ontario seriously calls into question conventional beliefs about the cultural limitations of the Irish Catholics not only in Canada but throughout North America.

The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History, Second Edition

In this follow-up to his acclaimed Surpassing Wonder, Akenson recreates the world of Christ, a time rich with ideas, prophets, factions, priests, savants, and god-drunk fanatics. Saint Saul sheds light on Yeshua's birth and his relationship to his family, clarifies Yeshua's views on issues such as divorce and resurrection, and examines his sense of himself as Messiah. Throughout Saint Saul Akenson insistently stresses the Jewishness of Yeshua. He dismisses the traditional way of searching for facts about him by looking for parallels among the four gospels, arguing that the gospels were handed down as a unit by a later generation. In contrast Saul, although he did not know Yeshua personally, knew his most important followers and wrote immediately after his death. Saul's teachings were approved, though sometimes reluctantly, by Yeshua's brothers and other early leaders. Akenson sifts and probes the evidence for and against the historical status of Saul and Yeshua, a mystery as fascinating as a good detective story and one where readers must come to their own conclusions about the circumstances and texts that gave rise to two great world-faiths, Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.

Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus

Akenson, Donald

Leaders & Notable People

Carleton University Press

What Noam Chomsky did for political commentary, and Stephen Hawking did for cosmology, Donald Harman Akenson does for the Bible and its interpreters, and the resulting conclusions are just as astounding. Surpassing Wonder illuminates how the greatest cultural artifacts of our civilization are related to one another and constitute the very core of our consciousness. With biting irreverence for denominational prejudices and the pretensions of academics, Akenson renews our sense of awe before these religious works. He challenges received doctrines, arguing that the ancient Jews were indeed idol worshippers and that Saint Paul did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth or in the virgin birth. With wit, elegance, and clarity Surpassing Wonder makes the ancient Hebrew scriptures, the Christian New Testament, and the Talmuds of the Rabbis accessible to all and shows they can be understood only in relation to each other and against their specific historical settings. Akenson argues that each of the great texts must be considered as the product of a single author and thus as a religious invention - that is, as a self-consciously formed unity rather than an anthology of disparate works. He also argues that the great inventor of the Hebrew scriptures should be credited with constructing the very concept of narrative history and thus the foundations of Western civilization. Using a rich and imagistic language that combines tractor mechanics, Winnie-the-Pooh, and architecture with analogies from astronomy, evolutionary biology, and economics, Akenson brings about nothing less than a radical reformation of how to think about the sacred texts. He restores their spiritual power through a just appreciation of the achievement of their authors while leaving readers to decide for themselves on the presence of a "guiding hand." Surpassing Wonder is a penetrating study of the historian's craft and a brilliant exposé of how theologians and biblical scholars abuse historical reasoning and evidence in their treatment of the sacred texts. Just as a previous reformation cast out the priestly intercessors, so Akenson casts the scholars out of the temple and lets readers in to see the texts anew. In so doing he reinvests religion with meaning for a contemporary world and shows us how Western civilization was created not by the Greeks of Athens or the patricians of Rome but by the desert worshippers of Yahweh.

Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

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: Volume 1

Asia

Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself

Using supporting evidence that runs from the Solomon Islands and classical China to ancient Ireland, Akenson argues that there are four basic genealogical forms. Highly significant on its own, this insight also provides the information needed to assess the Latter-day Saints' efforts to provide a single narrative of how humanity keeps track of itself. Appendices cover topics of vital interest to historians, genealogists, and ethnographers, such as the use and limits of genetic data in genealogy, the reality of false-paternity as a widespread phenomenon in genealogical lines, and the vexing issues of incest and cousin-marriage. A unique study of a neglected topic, Some Family illuminates the stories that cultures tell themselves through their family trees.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Akenson, Don. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Akenson, Don