Scandinavians, Robert Ferguson
Scandinavians, Robert Ferguson
List: $22.49 | Sale: $15.74
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Scandinavians
In Search of the Soul of the North

Author: Robert Ferguson

Narrator: Michael Page

Unabridged: 15 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/27/2017


Synopsis

Scandinavia is the epitome of cool: we fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system and their healthy outdoor lifestyle; we glut ourselves on their crime fiction; even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, commonsensical acceptance of life's vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider's view of Scandinavia, and how accurate is our picture of life in Scandinavia today?

Scandinavians follows a chronological progression across the Northern centuries: the Vendel era of Swedish prehistory; the age of the Vikings; the Christian conversions of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland; the unified Scandinavian state of the late Middle Ages; the sea-change of the Reformation; the kingdom of Denmark-Norway; King Gustav Adolphus and the age of Sweden’s greatness; the cultural golden age of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Munch; the impact of the Second World War; Scandinavia’s postwar social democratic nirvana; and the terror attacks of Anders Behring Breivik.


About Robert Ferguson

Robert Ferguson has written four literary biographies, including Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsen, Henry Miller: A Life, and Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography.

A leading authority in the field of Scandinavian studies, he is also the author of original works for radio and television and a two-time recipient of the BBC Methuen Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Drama.

Robert lives in Norway.


Reviews

This book was immediately shelved as "books I couldn't stand". Given so many stellar reviews, how is this even possible? Well, first of all I am myself Scandinavian (Swedish, to be more specific) and I picked up this book because it is interesting to look at your own culture from the outside. I also......more

Goodreads review by Erik

I'm Norwegian on both sides, the parents being cousins, and was raised in a Norwegian-speaking household, even attending pre-school in Oslo where I turned three. That ended when they built North School for the kids of the Meadowdale development in Illinois' Kane County, a rural area, a very small sc......more

Goodreads review by Lydia

A pleasant, intelligent and current (2016) view of Scandinavia written in "New Yorker" longform style. The award-winning author wrote the definitive biography of the Norwegian author, Knut Hamsun, and has lived in Norway for thirty years, married to a Norwegian. Ferguson drops in small personal disc......more

Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North Ole A. . .William J. . .William O. . .Robert O. . .these are the four men who stand between me and my birthplace. Without their journeys, I could have landed in Holbaek, Denmark, offspring of a reformed prostitute. Confirmed through my DNA, there’s a......more