Blueberry Summers: Growing Up at the Lake
by Curtiss Anderson
from Borealis Books
"I would begin thinking about summer on our lake as early as Easter. Yes, it was our lake, not just the lake."
In this classic story of a midwestern boyhood, Curtiss Anderson takes readers into the colorful lives of his robust Norwegian family and their wonderfully familiar summerscape in northern Minnesota: the lake place. Sweet childhood reminiscences comprise this coming-of-age memoir set in the poignant summers of the 1930s and '40s. Conversations on the porch with Dear Old Aunt Ingabord, a heavily accented relative from the Old Country. A budding romance and heartbreak with young Sarah, who lived across the lake. Wild blueberry picking behind Turnaround Island. Joyful tales devoted to cherished dogs he had outlived–old Shep and Mickey, Nebby, and feisty Bunny. And fond memories of Clara and Leigh, the loving couple who treated the budding writer as if he was their own child.
Anderson revisits the notes and letters he scripted as a boy, originally recorded on his hand-me-down Underwood typewriter–his first foray into what would become a distinguished publishing career–to offer Blueberry Summers. Here, the nationally recognized magazine editor offers a funny and warm story of experiences that inspire the imagination.
Curtiss Anderson
is a writer and editorial consultant. He has enjoyed an illustrious career with Hearst Magazines and Better Homes and Gardens and as editor in chief of Ladies Home Journal. He lives in Tiburon, California, with his wife, Anne. From the Wall Street Journal, Coming of Age at Lakeside, By ALLAN CARLSON June 7, 2008 My summers have almost always meant a trip to Minnesota lakes: for my first 15 years, to Leech Lake; for the 40-plus since, to Lake of the Woods or the Boundary Waters canoe country. The landscape is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, defined by rough granite outcrops, birch and pine trees, bogs, and lakes carved deep by the glaciers. Most of the lakes are connected by streams or old Indian portages. The year-long residents of this area are mostly the descendants of Swedes and Norwegians, with an occasional Dane or Finn providing diversity. The churches are mostly Lutheran. Remnants of the old languages survive in town festivals ("Uff Da Burgers"), cuisine (the formidable lutefisk) and backwoods bars where "Skl!" remains the favored salute. Returning each summer has been, for me, more than a homecoming. As my own son, standing on our favorite island in Lake of the Woods, put it at age 12: "Here is the place where I come alive." In "Blueberry Summers," a memoir, Curtiss Anderson also describes "the transformation that occurred when I arrived at the lake." In satisfying detail, he narrates life in and about an old farmhouse on a northeastern Minnesota chain lake during the 1930s and early 1940s. Mr. Anderson, a former magazine editor and writer, has a novelist's flair for framing characters. There is Leigh Johnson, his father's best friend, who became more than a second father to the permanently towheaded boy. Leigh was a meticulous man who knew the lake country as well as any Indian guide. A skilled fisherman, he remarked that "God doesn't count the hours fishing." There is Clara, Leigh's wife, mistress of the kitchen, whose love of life took form in her potato salad, exquisite doughnuts and Blue Boy Pie (combining wild blueberries, raspberries and blackberries). Though young Curtiss never saw his own parents touch each other, Clara and Leigh "were quite sexy in a cozy sort of way." There is Uncle Skoal, blond, handsome and scampish, who sported a wooden leg from a chain-saw accident. Commenting on Skoal's favorite pastimes, Aunt Dora concluded that "women would finish in a dead heat with gin." There is Great Aunt Ingeborg, an ancient Norwegian who became young Curtiss's "constant, endearing, and bewitching companion" as he recuperated from an accident. She talked of her wayfaring husband, Nels, who had been an iron miner and a pilot on Lake Superior ore boats. And there are the Schumachers, a refugee family with 12 children that had fled the Nazis, settled in a ramshackle farm across the lake and protected a secret. This family "grew, sewed, farmed, fished, trapped, or shot practically everything they ate or owned." Curtiss is drawn to Sarah, the eldest daughter, a horse-loving girl with exotic eyes and "velvety black hair." This little book is full of diverting tales. During a canoe trip, Curtiss catches a 10-pound walleye, puts it on a stringer in the water and then loses this great prize to ravenous turtles. (My own 9-pound, 6-ounce walleye, hooked at Leech Lake when I was 5, suffered an equally tragic fate.) Curtiss's and Skoal's illegal "catch" of a near-record 60- pound carp leads to white lies and notoriety. "Blueberry Summers" has a dark side. Mr. Anderson explores his troubled relationship with his parents -- saying the word "Dad," he confesses, "doesn't come easy for me" -- and he relates a disturbing incident on a "dead" lake that nearly took his life. The book ends with a tragedy. "All the harmony and beauty -- and security -- I had always associated with the lake," he writes, "was destroyed forever." And yet those qualities are also recovered in "Blueberry Summer," an ably crafted, true-life coming-of-age tale. The book will delight anyone who has ever known the lake country of the Upper Midwest. More broadly, it will reward and please readers who have ever had in their childhoods a special summer place.Arabian Sands (Penguin Classics)
by Wilfred Thesiger
from Penguin Classics
Arabian Sands is Wilfred Thesiger’s record of his extraordinary journey through the parched “Empty Quarter” of Arabia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Thesiger was repulsed by the softness and rigidity of Western life—“the machines, the calling cards, the meticulously aligned streets.” In the spirit of T. E. Lawrence, he set out to explore the deserts of Arabia, traveling among peoples who had never seen a European and considered it their duty to kill Christian infidels. His now-classic account is invaluable to understanding the modern Middle East.
The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman
by Nancy Marie Brown
from Harcourt
Letters from Africa, 1914-1931
by Isak Dinesen
from University Of Chicago Press
"Letters from Africa is literary gold, 24 karat."—Alden Whitman, Boston Globe
History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen
by Adam of Bremen
from Columbia University Press
Adam of Bremen's history of the see of Hamburg and of Christian missions in northern Europe from the late eighth to the late eleventh century is the primary source of our knowledge of the history, geography, and ethnography of the Scandinavian and Baltic regions and their peoples before the thirteenth century. Arriving in Bremen in 1066 and soon falling under the tutelage of Archbishop Adalbert, who figures prominently in the narrative, Adam recorded the centuries-long campaign by his church to convert Slavic and Scandinavian peoples. His History vividly reflects the firsthand accounts he received from travelers, traders, and missionaries on the peripheries of medieval Europe.
Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark
by Karin Palshoj
from Allen & Unwin
Christina, Queen of Sweden: The Restless Life of a European Eccentric (P.S.)
by Veronica Buckley
from Harper Perennial
Not unlike the elusive figure played by Greta Garbo, the real Queen Christina stood among the most flamboyant and controversial figures of the seventeenth century. All of Sweden could not contain her ambition or quench her thirst for adventure. Freed from her crown, she cut a breathtaking path across Europe -- spending madly, seeking out a more majestic throne, and stirring up trouble wherever she went. With a dazzling narrative voice and unerring sense of the period, Veronica Buckley goes beyond historical myth to breathe life into an extraordinary woman who set the world on fire and became an icon of her age -- a time of enormous change when Europe stood at the crossroads of religion and science, antiquity and modernity, war and peace.
This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
The Man Whom Women Loved: The Life of Bror Blixen
The Palace of the Snow Queen: Winter Travels in Lapland
by Barbara Sjoholm
from Shoemaker & Hoard
Sjoholm first travels to Kiruna, Sweden, to see the Ice Hotel under construction and to meet the ice artists who make its rooms into environmental art. Traveling to the North Cape, she encounters increasing darkness and cold, but also radiant light over the mountains and snow fields. She crosses the Finnmark Plateau by dogsled, attends a Sami film festival (with an outdoor ice screen), and visits Santa's Post Office in Finland.
Over the course of three winters, Sjoholm unearths the region's rich history, including the culture of the Sami. As Sjoholm becomes more familiar with Kiruna, she writes of the changes occurring in northern Scandinavia and contemplates the tensions between tourism, the expansion of mining and development of the Ice Hotel, and age-old patterns of land use, the Sami's struggle to maintain their reindeer grazing lands and migration routes.
In The Palace of the Snow Queen, Sjoholm relates her adventures in the far north, and considers how ice and snow shape our imaginations and create, at a time of global warming, a vision that increasingly draws visitors to Lapland.
Splendid Swedish Recipes
by Kerstin O. Van Guilder
from Penfield Press
This inexpensive, index card size spiral-bound recipe book features over 100 Swedish recipes. Makes a great gift or "stocking stuffer" for friends and relatives. The author came to America from Sweden in 1961.
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