03/12/2010
Isn't it nice when friends write books so good that you would like to assign them to scores of people to read? Two friends have written just that kind of book recently.
Nikolai's Fortune by Solveig Torvik is the story of her family in Norway and the Arctic, and it is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Her family went through terrible times: two world wars, hard times in terms of the economy, and Solveig was spared the worst of it because her parents came to the U.S. when she was a child. But through it all, the basic decency of many of her relatives added just enough comfort for her relatives to press onward.
Solveig more recently wrote another book, the kind excellent journalists like her seem able to dash off with almost the same ease that they display in filing stories. This one is The World's Best Place Norway and the Norwegians and is published as an ebook by Smashwords. It is an examination of her home country, which has for the past several years been judged as the best place in the world to live. But is it? Does the cradle-to-grave socialism really make a country's citizens content and ambitious? Solveig has some surprising and sometimes upsetting answers to that question.
The other friend with an excellent book out is Joann Byrd, who had a long and distinguished career in journalism, too. She was one of the earliest ombudsmen for the Washington Post, and ended her career back in her birthplace, the Northwest, as editorial director of the late and lamented print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
Joann is the author of Calamity: The Heppner Flood of 1903. It is one of the worst disasters to hit the Northwest, perhaps the greatest, but very few people know about it. This was because it was so bad -- much like a war -- that people didn't want to talk about it. It wasn't a secret, it was just something people didn't care to discuss. So when Joann heard about it for the first time in 2003 during the centennial observance, she began her research. It is a beautifully written book, full of fascinating details that only a superb researcher will find.
Both Nikolai's Fortune and Calamity were published by the University of Washington Press.
