Non-Fiction_NATURE/POPULAR SCIENCE

Through narratives from science, history, and journeys in nature, we come to understand why the air rarely stays still, and how the constant flow of seeds, water vapour, pollutants, and microbes shapes the world. Columbus sought out a route to Asia but found trade winds heading for America. Vasco da Gama defied centuries of logic and battled the monsoon. You’ll read about a Briton who explored sandstorms in a Ford Model T, about how Japan used the wind to bomb the United States, about Jesuit monks who were the first to predict hurricanes, and about how Vilhelm Bjerknes’ young meteorologists revolutionised international weather forecasting from the tiny Norwegian city of Bergen.

Anna Blix takes the reader on a personal, investigative, and deeply fascinating journey through each of the 40 weeks in a human pregnancy. Parallelly, for each week, we meet other creatures who have just delivered their next generation into the world. The bacteria E. coli has multiplied by two within 20 minutes. An Eastern grey kangaroo is pregnant for just 5 weeks before giving birth to a baby the size of a bean, which then crawls into its pouch to grow. And the birds with the longest incubation period of all, the wandering albatross, is done with their incubation period after only 10 weeks.
This book gives evolutionary comfort throughout the troubles of pregnancy, and an explanation as to how we ended up here: as the smartest species with the most tiresome, but nonetheless not such a bad way to reproduce.

In the early 1970s, a group of scientists researched how to make more food for the population of the world. They looked to the sea. They sampled genes from salmon in 41 Norwegian and Swedish rivers, and designed a new salmon that was fatter, more docile, and faster growing. This was the beginning of a new industry – salmon farming.
The industry spread from coastal Norway to Scotland, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Chile, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. Jobs were created, business boomed, and salmon farmers became extremely rich. A new type of food, the salmon sushi, spread around the globe. But as soon as this new fish was let loose in nature, unexpected things started to happen. Wild salmon stocks disappeared, diseases spread in salmon farms, salmon louse swarmed, and the new industry became highly contested.

In a prizewinning five-year investigation, authors Sætre and Østli has taken a closer look at the salmon industry. For the first time, the global history of salmon farming is told. The result combines nature writing from Norwegian fjords, the coast of Canada, Icelandic landscapes and the far south of Chile with classical muckraking and character-driven literary non-fiction. The authors start out with a question: What happens when you place a new animal in the sea?

If you look into the amber eyes of the fox, you’ll discover that the pupils are vertical slits, like those of a cat. There’s a clue about the nature of the fox right there: a cat’s eyes in a slender canine body. The fox lives close to people, both in the city and in the country, but it is often shy and secretive. In Wild, Andreas Tjernshaugen shares his experiences from two years of watching foxes in a rural area near his home outside Oslo, Norway, where they are hunted and typically shun people.
The book also delves into the cultural history of the fox, and compares fictional foxes with the real ones.

You and I are much more deeply interwoven into the intricate fabric of nature than we might think. Millions of species give us food, medicine and a habitable environment – and nature is also a source of knowledge and joy.
In characteristically engaging prose, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson regales readers with exciting and thought-provoking stories about nature.
Fascinating tales of our interactions with nature, from the author of popular science bestseller, Extraordinary Insects.

Winston Churchill said: ‘Dogs look up to us, cats look down on us. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.’ But the relationship between pig and human is complicated.

The pig is a living metaphor for all that is filthy, ugly, shameful and sinful. The pig is cast out – or more accurately, penned in, carefully concealed from the human gaze. Industrially farmed pigs never have the experience of lumbering out into the fresh spring air after being shut in for half a year like cows, and few people seem to care. At the same time, the pig is an invaluable medical model for the human body. And it is the animal we have eaten most of in the past fifty years.

To get to the bottom of its essence and its mysteries, Kristoffer Hatteland Endresen cared for a litter of pigs from birth to slaughter in Jæren’s intensive pork industry. The result is a fascinating tale of appetite and aversion, meat and morals. And of a question that has haunted us across the ages: where, in fact, is the dividing line between humans and animals?

Sigri Sandberg has always been afraid of the dark. She undertakes a solo voyage to the mountains in the dead of winter to probe the darkness as well as uncover what lies behind her own fear. As she journeys, she introduces us to another woman, Christiane Ritter, who spent a long winter in a trapper’s hut on Svalbard in 1934.

Sandberg writes about what happens to the body at night. She touches on sleep, stars, black holes, northern lights, but also airspace laws and the global struggle to maintain a night sky. Could it be that the scary darkness in fact is much more important than we may have thought?

Where do the elements come from and could we use them up? Physicist Anja Røyne takes an original approach, writing a book about the building blocks from which we humans – and the whole of the world – are made. By asking questions like “could we run out of iron?” and “is there enough sand?”, she leads the reader into discussions about the world’s resources at both the micro and macro level, and about how the universe fits together.
Winner of the 2018 Brage Prize for best popular science book

A comedian’s reluctant attempt to learn to love nature

Are Kalvø grew up smack dab in the middle of a postcard in north-western Norway, surrounded by fjords and mountains that people from halfway across the globe travel to see. Yet he’s never been much of an outdoorsman. Once he moved to the city, he never looked back. This has never been a problem.

Until a few years ago, Kalvø began losing friends to the mountains. One day, Kalvø realized that he did not have a single Facebook friend who had not posted a single photo of themselves on a mountain. That’s enough to make a person start wondering. Is it perhaps me who has been mistaken all this time? In fear of missing out on something, he heads out to the mountains himself…

Torbjørn Ekelund takes the reader on a personal and fascinating journey through the history of the path, from when the first humans migrated north after the last ice age to the organised hiking trails of our time.

In Praise of Paths is a tale of movement and sense of orientation, migration and shortcuts, about the migration routes of birds and animals, about the landscape’s significance to our lives, about our inherited need to move around, and about what we have lost in an age where everyone sits in an office, drives a car and navigates using GPS.

A predator, mythical and debated, is lurking around in the Scandinavian woods.
At first the author just wants to get close to it. Then his search becomes an obsession.

The forests of folklore are the homes of strange, supernatural creatures. But worldly beasts have also aroused wonder and fear. None more so than the wolf. Reidar Müller, an otherwise sober naturalist, becomes deeply fascinated with this mysterious animal of prey. He learns from experienced woodsmen how to track the wolf, and is drawn ever deeper into the woods. Until he finds himself standing alone in the wilderness, howling to the Grey Wolf.

The Cryosphere is the name of those parts of the earth that contain frozen water; like snow, ice, permafrost, glaciers – and something that very few has heard of: invisible glaciers. This is a part of the world that most of us only know from afar – with the exception of Norwegians and other Northerners. But we see less and less of it, as the area is shrinking.
Bjørn Vassnes is Norway´s leading science journalist and native to the arctic plateau of Finnmarksvidda, and in The Kingdom of Frost he takes us on a fascinating journey through climate research, biology, cultural history and archaeology.

This is a story about a journey that started abruptly when the author’s life collapsed. In the midst of paralyzing grief, she stumbles upon the wondrous world of mushrooms. As she sets out on a voyage of discovery into the realm of fungi, she ventures along a parallel journey through an inner landscape of pain and sorrow.
As Long takes the reader through this simultaneously funny and heartbreaking story, her unusual, personal quest soon feels familiar; at it’s underlying core the story is one of common human experience.

Take a plunge into the science of memory, together with sisters Hilde and Ylva Østby.
They explore the many facets of memory and how it influences our lives, both from a neuroscience perspective and through conversations with some of the most influential memory researchers of our time. Diving for Seahorses explains memory through personal and vivid tale telling, combining the best of two craftsmanships: Hilde is a novelist, and Ylva is a neuropsychologist.

Most of the life processes within and around us involve carbon in one form or another. Carbon in pure form can be both graphite in a pencil, and diamond. It is also the starting point for most of the synthetic materials which pervade modern life. However, the essence of Dag O. Hessen’s story is the lifecycle of carbon, the important balance between photosynthesis and cellular respiration, between building and burning. This book gives us the basis we need for that understanding. It is an informal, well-informed book written with strong personal commitment by one of Norway’s best presenters of research and science.