Scandinavian Review

Award Recipients at the Asf Gala Dinner April 22, 2010

H.R.H. Princess Benedikte of Denmark Recipient of the ASF Award for Distinguished Public Service H.R.H. PRINCESS BENEDIKTE plays an active role in a large number of Danish and global civic and humanitarian organizations, including the Olave Baden-Powell Society of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, the Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement House, Inc. in New York, the World Diabetes Foundation and the World Breeding Federation for Sport Horses.

Karita Mattila

[...] how about calling her, instead, one of the most glorious lyric soprano voices in the world today, praised to the skies all over the globe, an opera singer who can look the part and actto boot. Because that is the essence of Karita Mattila (pronounced KA-ree-ta MAT-ti-la). The good news is that she is still looking forward to tackling new, as yet untried, roles, offering personal challenges and matchless enjoyment for music lovers the world over.

Hamsun & Undset

Bjørnson was one of Norway's greatest writers of the 19th century and a national hero, whose international reputation was once considerable but now diminished.

Midwest Sojourns

While there he suffered greatly from starvation and cold and gained the bitter experiences described so poignantly in his breakthrough novel Hunger, which was still 10 years in the future. Because he had failed to become the Norwegian writer in Norway, he would become the poet for Norwegian immigrants in America. The Spiritual Life of Modern America was the first Norwegian book (and one of the first European books) to be critical of the U.S. To a surprising extent it is still timely, with i...

Based in Brooklyn

Sigrid Undset gave her account of the escape in Life magazine (June 10, 1940): "When my youngest sort and I had boarded the train for Lillehammer, a couple of bombs dropped just outside the railway station, making the whole train shake and tremble." IN NEW YORK SIGRID UNDSET WAS WARMLY RECElVTD BY Alfred and Blanche Knopf.\n Then she was asked to write a book for American schoolchildren about life in Norway before the German occupation, Undset was about to complete the book she was writing a...

The Climate Change Conundrum

Basic facts: * Over the past century, the global surface temperature of the earth has increased by 0.7 degrees C. It iS projected to reach an average of 2 degrees C by mid-century, the greatest rise in temperature in the last 5,000 years. * The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now 380 ppm; if it reaches more than 400 ppm, the tipping point for catastrophic impacts, sea levels could rise dramatically drowning low-lying coastal areas and creating millions of climate refugees. * The...

The Girls On Seestrasse

Herr Gottlieb tried to focus on the pattern on the ceiling where there was a geometric pattern that repeated so that he could draw lines between the button-sized mint-green spots and the small, light-colored dots around the outer edge, so that everything turned into hubs and spokes, or rays of sunshine in children's drawings, like the ones hanging in the nursing home, in Emmerich Kunze 's room, who had actually been the best of them, Herr Gottlieb had to concede in the end. Because when they...

Les Elgs

If she remains famous for older generations as die co-star of Gene Kelly Lana Turner and Glenn Ford in large-scale MGM productions of the 1950s, she has also drawn younger audiences as a Broadway star, a television soap opera lead and, for the film cuJtists who have seen it, as the first woman to share a screen with Arnold Schwarzenegger. [...] before the emergence of the director-brothers Aid and Mika Kaurismaki in the late 1980s, EIg was just about all there was to talk about when the subj...

Has the Rain Become a Drizzle?

[...] at a pH of 5 or below nearly all of the game fish and other top predators will be extinct. [...] the only organisms that seem to survive are some species of water beetles and old, resistant eels. Since the 1990s, stocks of perch (Perca fluviatilis) have been steadily increasing in many of the country's formerly acidified lakes and streams, a clear sign that natural ecosystems are recovering from die worst impacts of acidification.

Three Excerpts From Cars and Animals

Short Stories earned Sean Hughes the Leifand lnger Sjöberg Translation Prize for 2009. What initially appear to be simple stories reveal themselves upon closer reading to be works of great emotional depth, complexity and accuracy - not to mention humor. [...] in these quiet stories lie also moments of great drama: catastrophe on a ferry, the blossoming and withering of love, traffic accidents and revelations about cheating husbands. Some of the litde kids started screaming, people came run...

The Man with the Dragon Tattoo

Foremost was his dedication to the principles of his grandfather - beliefs that inspired his activism for the Kormnunistiska Arbetareforlmndet (Communist Workers League) and would subsequently make him the editor of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen (The Fourth International).\n The only document bearing on the estate was a statement written by Larsson way back in 1 977, when he asserted that he wanted to leave everything to the Umeåli branch of the Communist Workers Leagu...

Sibelius: A Composer's Life and the Awakening of Finland

Sibelius: A Composer's Life and the Awakening of Finland By Glenda Dawn Goss The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2009 549 pages, hardcover, $55 ISBN: 13: 978-0-226-30477-9 This is a major book, one that is expected to serve as the main Englishlanguage biography of the great Finnish composer for many years to come.

The Vikings

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance

The American Girl

Sverre Fehn: The Pattern of Thoughts

Knut Hamsun Abroad: International Reception

The Last Fix

Reykjavík Inside Out

Tolerance and Compassion: Henrik Wergeland and His Legacy

The American-Scandinavian Foundation Annual Donor Support

DMD Albert & Mary Lasker Foundation Bertha Lindefjeld Periti J. C. Lindfors William B. Morris Susanne Nordenbaek, Visit Denmark Roger E. Norton, James G. Kennedy & Co. Inc. Marie-Flore Poulsen Mrs. Eben Pyne Québec Goverment Office Victor A. Régnier The Honorable Rozanne L. Ridgway Mark Robinson Mr. and Mrs. Ernst Rothe The Honorable Anelise Sawkins Mr. and Mrs. Sigurjón Sighvatsson Michael Stemfeld Inger M. Tallaksen Maurice Tempelsman Susan F. Ullmann Mr. and Mrs. Werner Valeur-Jens...

The Campaign for Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America

Leif Höegh Foundation Skanska AB Stolt-Nielsen S.A. $250,000-$499,000 ABB LTD Bristol-Myers Squibb Company The Estate of Edith Coulter Lena and Gilbert Kaplan LEGO Company/ LEGO Systems, Inc. Nordic Investment Bank The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Hilppa and Joe L. Roby Skandia Statoil Marketing & Trading (U.S). Teekay Foundation $100,000-$249,999 The Absolut Company Aker RGI Louise and Karl Andren Axel Johnson Inc. The Bonnier G roup The Curtis L. Carlson Family Foundation Danske ...

Membership Support

President's Circle Member John A. Nielsen Patron Members Birgitta Tyra Dill Dr. Henry P. Godfrey & Ginger Schnaper Donald & Elizabeth Kramer Lance & Marjorie Lindblom Benny & Jane Nordahl Edith T. Reed Dr. Rutbert D. Reisch Palle & Rita Rye Tara Steinfeld Britt-Marie Tidelius Nini Werz Sustaining Associate Members Peggy & Keith Anderson Anonymous Benjamin A. Bankson Kann J. Barkhorn.