Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North Hardcover - 2017

From the publisher

"An engaging, layered look into a culture complex enough both to produce stylish rain gear and to embrace the foul weather that necessitates it." --The New York Times Book Review

We fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system and healthy outdoor lifestyle; we devour 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 attack of Anders Behring Breivik.

Scandinavians is also a personal investigation, with award-winning author Robert Ferguson as the ideal companion as he explores not only the region's society, politics, culture, and temperament, but also wide-ranging topics such as the power and mystique of Scandinavian women, from the Valkyries to the Vikings; from Nora and Hedda to Garbo and Bergman.

"A delightful history in which the author truly captures 'the soul of the North.' "--Kirkus Reviews

About the author