Margaret Harris's Reviews > An Irish History of Civilization: Volume 1

A more honest title for this doorstopper would have been, Don Akenson’s Salacious History of Humankind. By the end his perspective is bordering on pornography. Am glad I never had to sit through one of this guy’s classes.

Essentially, he takes reported history through several millennia and fills in the forgotten or unknowable details with his own conjecture and imaginings—particularly features about his subjects’ sexual habits. It is a way, maybe, when we are looking back about 5,000 years and then proceeding forward from there to here (or up to the beginning of 1845 for Volume I), to understand the evolutionary steps through time of “Western” human progression. As long as we don’t forget that he himself promises it to be a “fictive” story, I think the reader can perhaps learn a few things—although whether we might need to know the prurient details is questionable. There is a freewheeling cynicism in the writing that becomes more tiresome than funny after so many pages. Pretty depressing to slog through 800 pages of vignettes about approximately the same number of supposed rogues. Some of the characters are familiar historically, others not, and surely more than a few are “fictive.”

Volume I ends “minutes” before the Great Irish Hunger begins in 1845. I will probably torture myself by reading Volume II later—so that I can find out if he ever tries to redeem himself, but more likely so that I can compound my criticism of his approach.

As for “Irish” history, I prefer listening to their songs: the happy, the sad, the poignant, the historical remembrances, the mythological, and any other category.