As a translator of many of the letters Ole Ruud sent back to his family in Norway, I got to know this remarkable man quite well. Unlike so many letters of 100 or more years ago, letters having little information about anything outside of the writer's immediate surroundings and the physical and spiritual health of the family, Mr. Ruud's letters paint a much broader picture. You learn that his was an unusually fertile, forward-looking mind, teeming with ideas and plans for the future. At times, it feels as if his life was an embodiment of the development of the state itself. Still, in spite of...