Best for: Anyone possibly considering a move to Denmark. Or just people who like fish-out-of-water stories. In a nutshell: Writer Helen Russell moves with her husband to the land of Legos for (at least) a year, and takes the time to document her experience and how it differs from life in the UK. Line that sticks with me: “ ‘We have a lot of ‘curling parents’ in Denmark, who do everything for their kids and won’t say not to them. The expression is named after […]
Culture Shock
First Fieldwork was an assigned reading when I took Intro to Anthropology in college. That was a good 15 years ago, and since then I’ve reread this book probably five times. It’s short, it’s interesting, and it’s hilarious. Barbara Gallatin Anderson recounts a fieldwork assignment in the tiny fishing village of Taarnby, Denmark. She and her husband are there to study the changes that urbanization is making to the culture of the small town. To this non-anthropologist, that sounds dull as dishwater, and I’m guessing […]
Miserable Weather + Terrible Taxes = Happy People?
If I’d just seen Michael Booth’s The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia, I never would have read it. First of all, the cover of the Finnish edition is hokey as hell. Bad publisher. Go to your room and think of what you’ve done. Second of all, what would you think, if you saw a book that’s just 300 odd pages about Scandinavia and Scandinavian people? Boring, right? Booth mentions very early on that many people to whom he talked about his book project […]
Out of Denmark
My final review for 2014 is a collection of short stories by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), perhaps best known for Out of Africa and Babette’s Feast. This collection is my first exposure to Dinesen’s work; the title and time of year made it seem appropriate. I have read a few re-imagined fairy tales this year, but Winter’s Tales does not fit the fairy tale model. In fact, after reading the first few stories, I wasn’t sure what to make of them at all and considered […]