Episode Details

BIO:

Gary Goodman is a former rare book dealer from Stillwater MN, whose first book, The Last Bookseller, chronicled his life in the secondhand book trade. His new book, Longships and Sod Houses, focuses on his Icelandic ancestors, one of whom was a notorious Viking warrior and stone-cold killer sometimes called Egil the Bastard.

SYNOPSIS:

Gary Goodman first heard that his 24x great-grandfather was a tenth-century Viking pirate and mercenary at a family reunion, when a cousin told him that they were the direct descendants of an Icelandic poet and cold-blooded killer named Egil Skallagrímsson. Also known as “Egil the Bastard,” Goodman’s forefather was the subject of Egil’s Saga, one of the great Icelandic epics from the early Middle Ages. Spurred by this revelation of his family’s lineage, Goodman set out to discover the route his ancestors had traveled from Iceland in the 800s to the North Dakota plains in the later 1800s.

LINKS:

www.thelastbookseller.com