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From the archives

A Strange Road to Hell

Technology, culture and the march to World War One

Lax Americana

What happens if Donald Trump returns to the White House?

Gardens of Mourning

The vast, idealistic effort to bury World War One's fallen soldiers

Donald Akenson

Donald Harman Akenson is the author of Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (Harcourt Brace, 2001).

Articles by
Donald Akenson

Someone to Watch over Us

Did major faiths thrive by keeping societies honest? January–February 2014
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…

After Le grand dérangement

Acadians exiles ended up everywhere from Louisiana swamps to London slums January–February 2013
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…

A Classic Victorian Yarn

Stunning scenery, oily foreign tricksters and priceless archaeology September 2010
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…