God's Peoples: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and Her Own Desire

By Donald Harman Akenson

Book Overview

Chosen as one of Library Journal's Best Books of 1992 "Superb scholarship and compelling writing."--Library Journal "Splendidly illuminating and enthrallingly readable."--Conor Cruise O'Brien Asserting that the dominant peoples of South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Israel have based their cultural identity on a belief in a covenant with an all-powerful God, Akenson vividly characterizes the effects of this conviction on each nation's history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080142755X
• ISBN13: 9780801427558
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 404 Pages
• Weight: 1.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A layman view

As a child of the Scotch Irish diaspora, I am finding this book riveting. The thesis presented here carefully demonstrates the powerful and ongoing impact of the Hebrew Scripture, particularly the covenanting of God's "Chosen People," on peoples who read and take seriously (even literally) the several thousand year old constructs of the ancient Hebrew tribe of Israel. Most of my pondering about the "why" of customs and belief systems of my own almost entirely Scotch Irish family find articulation in this amazing book. Four hundred years after Calvin and over 200 since the last of my family left Ulster, the power of the covenant lingers still. I wish Dr. Akenson could consider exploring the town of Due West, South Carolina, and Erskine College, to find the very strong threads of this culture alive and well in the United States.

God's Peoples reviewed by a "God's Person"

D.H. Akenson has masterfully taken a complex subject, that being the Old Testament, along with South African, Irish, and Jewish histories, and has put it together in a very compelling thesis. It is well organized in sections dealing with the origins of the particular covenants, a section on the covenant and the state, and a section of the covenant in recent times. The book is very hard to read for the layman, but for the informed he has done a great service. The only weaknesses I find is that he does not do present enough analysises of the differences within the covenanted peoples, especially as certain factions differed on the application of the covenant.