Robert Ferguson has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Scandinavians.
The Cabin in the Mountains
Summary
Turf-roofed and wooden-built, offering fresh clean air, peace, isolation and the promise of a day's wood-chopping, hiking or snow-clearing amid landscapes of great beauty, the hytte - or wooden cabin home - is a crucial part of the national identity of every Norwegian. In 2016, Robert Ferguson and his wife bought a piece of land high up in the Hardangervidda, the plateau that dominates south-central Norway, and on it they built such a hytte. For Ferguson, the hytte represented the realisation of a dream that first brought him to Norway from England more than 30 years ago. As the cabin takes shape he learns, through conversations with friends and cabin builders, the cultural history of modern Norway. He learns of the changing traditions attached to these cabin homes for native Norwegians as they try to marry their newfound urban affluence to their past as a tight-knit, impoverished rural community-nation. Along the way he also describes the intense and mutually rewarding relationship that arose between the colonial Norwegians and their wealthy, imperialist British neighbours across the North Sea in the 19th and 20th centuries; how the British 'salmon-lords' showed them another way of looking at their great rivers, and how English climbers introduced them to a new way of thinking about their mountains.
©2019 Robert Ferguson (P)2019 Head of Zeus
Scandinavians
Summary
Scandinavia is the epitome of cool: We fill our homes with Nordic furniture; we envy their humane social welfare system and their healthy outdoor lifestyle; we glut ourselves on their crime fiction. Even their strangely attractive melancholia seems to express a stoic, commonsensical acceptance of life's vicissitudes. But how valid is this outsider's view of Scandinavia, and how accurate is our picture of life in Scandinavia today? Scandinavians follows a chronological progression across the Northern centuries: the Vendel era of Swedish prehistory; the age of the Vikings; the Christian conversions of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland; the unified Scandinavian state of the late Middle Ages; the sea change of the Reformation; the kingdom of Denmark-Norway, King Gustav Adolphus, and the age of Sweden's greatness; the cultural golden age of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Munch; the impact of the Second World War; Scandinavia's postwar social democratic nirvana; and the terror attacks of Anders Behring Breivik.
©2016 Robert Ferguson (P)2017 Tantor