Products tagged with 'norwegian-american'

Although Home River is a work of fiction, readers should not underestimate the great amount of historicity therein. Rodney Nelson has captured in carefully honed language the distinctive lilt of Norwegian-American dialect and the political and social atmosphere of the Red River Valley of the North in the middle 1940s. By imagining one small episode from that era, he achieves an authenticity of voice and color which might not have been possible in a strict recounting or memoir. Rodney Nelson has studied the valley for most of his life; his novels, stories and books of poems reflect his clear-eyed, unsentimental love for this rich land and difficult climate, and for the equally complex people who chose to settle the area, his grandparents among them. Home River is first of all a work of fiction whose intent is simply to please-but one of the many other things the book does is to help us preserve our knowledge of the immigrant pioneering spirit as manifested in the settlers of the Red River Valley and their children.

“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.