St Patrick catching sight of Ireland for the first time as he is taken there as a prisoner...Joyce and Yeats eating sticky buns in a Dublin cafe...There has never before been an Irish history book remotely like this one, composed as a vast mosaic of incidents, encounters and vignettes. It is not so much a 'history of Irish civilization' as an 'Irish history of civilization'. In telling a wide range of stories about the Irish everywhere this historical-fictional account of the Irish peoples around the globe 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. The stories themselves are by turns funny, acerbic, ironic, score-settling - never quite what they seem at face value. They are also deeply informed by the author's vast knowledge of Ireland, its history and its diaspora. For once the hyperbole is true - after this book, Irish history will never be the same again.

'Some of these stories are accurate; all of them are true...' In his An Irish History of Civilization , Don Akenson, the world's leading scholar of the Irish Dispora, fuses history and fiction into a remarkable narrative of the people and their influence around the globe. An Irish History of Civilization is about the Irish at home and abroad, the great and the small, the noble and the depraved, the saints and he sinners, adventures and idealists. As Akenson follows his chosen people on their odyssey around the globe, the lines between history and fiction become irretrievably, beguilingly lost in the mists of time. Volume Two begins with the Great Famine and goes on to show the Irish adapting, improvising and innovating in Ireland and overseas - in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia and South Africa. The book ends by demonstrating the centrality of both Catholic and Protestant Irish culture to the United States.