Report on a Biography of Stieg Larsson for the Adult Summer Reading Club

Stieg Larsson: Our Days In Stockholm by Kurdo Baksi.

Part One

For the Adult Summer Reading Club I earlier reported on A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of the Mother of President Barack Obama. She died in the mid-nineteen-nineties and did not witness her son's achievement. She was fifty-two. Stieg Larsson died in 2004, after he finished three volumes of The Millenium Series but before their publication and success. He was fifty years old.

In these two books I found a similar construction: What drove her? asked Jenna Scott. Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Sotoro worked through difficult conditions, neglected health concerns to pour energy into anthropology field work and jobs that applied her studies. She did detailed field work on crafts in Indonesia.

Who was Stieg? asks Kurdo Baksi. "No human being is capable of working like Stieg did. Did he do it in an attempt to achieve ambitious goals he set himself, or was it some kind of escapism?"

In Stieg Larsson: Our Days In Stockholm, we learn how Larsson approached Kurdo Baksi to share publication of their magazines Expo and Svartt Vitt. On page 48 - "What the force was that drove Stieg was Justice - irrespective of class, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation".

Part Two

From Sunday to Monday after I worked on this report, at church and at a garage sale I reflected on this from the lesson in Romans: Romans 8: 5-6 - "For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace."

Dedication for these two people overrode a watch on self-management and self-care. At the garage sale a Floe Blue covered dish and batiks, a collection focus for Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Sotoro, bring clearly the image of practical life spiritually enhanced by decorated or hand made beauty. Within the practical texture, color, images brought an immediate experience of the Spirit.

Part Three

In the Stieg Larsson memoir I learn that Larsson included Kurdo Baksi as a character in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest - Kurdo Baksi refers Michael Blomkvist to an immigrant who can work for him. It was important that none of the work will be illegal.

(One element of the experience of the two as colleagues was that Svartt Vitt, the magazine of Kurdo Baksi, had lost funding. When I read of this I remembered a news article about friction between the refugees and the government in Sweden. I read in a book that immigrants could lose funding if Sweden suspected a link to militancy in the former country. Sweden's funding of refugee groups was for survival in Sweden. Sweden was not funding militancy.)

In Kurdo Baksi's book we learn about the journalist colleagues' experience with the racism that afflicted them as a voice for justice.

There is a chapter on feminism and a chapter on Stieg Larsson's fiction.