What We Leave Behind book event featuring author Barb Solberg

One Book, One ND book event with author Barb Solberg

One Book One North Dakota is a statewide book club that features best-selling authors in a 60-minute webinar. Attendees are encouraged to participate in a Q&A with the author.

Sunday, December 10

4-5pm CT

About the book:

Martin and Asta came to America in 1913 to homestead and create a better life for themselves and a hoped-for family. Nineteen years later during the difficult years of the Great Plains Dust Bowl, they intend to improve the lives of three of their nine children by sending their eighteen-year-old daughter with her two younger sisters to Norway to live with relatives for two years.

But things do not go according to plan.

The oldest sister falls in love with and marries a young Norwegian man leaving the two younger sisters with no one to take them home. By 1940, when Germany invades Norway, the two younger sisters were living with the family relative who in the meantime married a Quisling, a member of the Norwegian Nazi Party. The two sisters miss the last US evacuee ship out of Petsamo, Finland, and soon German soldiers take one sister to Grini, a concentration camp north of Oslo. Eventually she and her older sister both marry men active in the Norwegian Resistance Movement of WWII.

Will the entire family ever reconnect?

Barb Solberg, a native North Dakotan, spent most of her professional career teaching, speaking, and writing. She has published in magazines and newspapers as well as with Harcourt College Publishers. Retired now, she and her husband have two adult children, five grandchildren, and live in North Dakota.

Moderator:

Dr. Randi Tanglen is vice provost for faculty affairs at the University of North Dakota. She was previously executive director of Humanities Montana and professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, TX. She has published scholarly articles on U.S. women writers and literary history.

One Book, One ND events are sponsored by the Paris Family Foundation and Prairie Public 

HND Value Statement

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this {article, book, exhibition, film, program, database, report, Web resource}, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities North Dakota. However, in an increasingly polarized world, we at Humanities North Dakota believe that being open-minded is necessary to thinking critically and rationally. Therefore, our programs and classes reflect our own open-mindedness in the inquiry, seeking, and acquiring of scholars to speak at our events and teach classes for our Public University. To that end, we encourage our participants to join us in stepping outside our comfort zones and considering other perspectives and ideas by being open-minded while attending HND events featuring scholars who hold a variety of opinions, some being opposite of our own held beliefs.

Humanities North Dakota classes and events are funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities