Products tagged with 'family'

Radium is about two bad-luck brothers from a bad-luck town in the flat farmland of western Minnesota. Jim, the narrator, is fifteen and damaged, the result of a car accident years before that left him with a head injury and a tweaked view of the world. He sees his big brother, Billy Quinn, in near mythic terms. Billy is wild and strong and capable of things other men are not.

They live together in a trailer house on the ditch-side of a beet field until Billy gets into bad trouble, and then they go on the run. That’s what wild young men like Billy—growing up rangy and unsupervised in the desperate middle of this country—do when trouble comes. They run. They drive cars fast. They go west. They live on the lam, always about three days from a federal manhunt.

Laws are broken, but with an older brother his only true friend on earth—a brother he loves more than his own next breath—Jim justifies their deeds, willing to do . . . anything . . . to keep Billy free.

Hardcover, 400 pages

Follow this link for a splendid, intellectual interview with John about writing and Radium.

11-oz. capacity
Dishwasher- & microwave-safe
Ceramic
White exterior
Ships directly from manufacturer

“You’re not to think you are anything special.”

Rule #1: Laws of Jante, the Unofficial Rules of Norway

Alt for One, One for Alt: A Devastating Saga of a North Dakota Farm Kid documents the 21,000 miles Jeffrey Karl Johnson traveled in ten weeks to ten Norwegian cities, all while haunted by both his ancestral Norwegian family and his North Dakotan birth family. Why did he dare travel to the Motherland? He was an earnest contestant on the highly rated, highly expensive, and highly campy reality TV show Alt for Norge, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to win the big prize of meeting his Norwegian relatives for the first time. The true prize, he would discover, was bigger and more dangerous than expected: the journey itself. The path into his Norwegian heritage, and his slow crawl back, came with a cost—and a reward.

As the world feels increasingly chaotic, Jeffrey Karl Johnson became convinced that studying Norwegian culture offers unexpected insight into how societies survive—and recover from—deeply ingrained self-punishing systems of thought. Alt for One, One for Alt explores Norway, North Dakota, Minnesota, Johnson's family, and the ways individuals and cultures wrestle with inherited patterns of abuse and authoritarianism. Along the way, he became an unlikely contestant on the Norwegian reality show Alt for Norge—essentially, Survivor for Norwegian grandmothers—where Norwegian Americans compete for the chance to meet lost family in Norway. While he's no fan of reality TV, the show became a powerful lens for examining both Norwegian culture and his own family history.