Donald Akenson

Ara Norenzayan, a professor in the psychology department of the University of British Columbia, clearly had fun writing Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. His joy in ideas, his delight in being a contrarian and his unspoken but obvious pleasure in kicking senior members of the chattering class comes through with entertaining…

Call me concussed, but I enjoy PhD theses, especially when they are nicely rewritten and turned into real books. And Christopher Hodson’s The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History is a very good book indeed. Hodson began to study history at Utah State University, then at Northwestern University. He now teaches at Brigham Young…

Whether writing fact or fiction, one of the things the Victorians of the British Isles did well was to tell ripping yarns. Consider all those heroines wandering through drawing rooms, across moors and mountains (often in the same clothes), looking for their version of Mr. Darcy; or the travellers’ records (if such they were) that ranged from darkest Ireland…