Surpassing Wonder is a penetrating study of the historian's craft and a brilliant expose of how theologians and biblical scholars abuse historical reasoning and evidence in their treatment of the sacred texts. Just as a previous reformation cast out the priestly intercessors, so Akenson casts the scholars out of the temple and lets readers in to see the texts anew. In so doing he reinvests religion with meaning for a contemporary world and shows us how Western civilization was created not by the Greeks of Athens or the patricians of Rome but by the desert worshippers of Yahweh.

McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998.
ISBN: 9780773517813. 658 pp.
Hardcover. Very good in a very good jacket.
Spine a bit cocked.