No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home - Softcover

Offutt, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0684865521 ISBN 13: 9780684865522

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists. Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt's parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

About this title

Review:

Janet Maslin The New York Times Captivating...Offutt is a wonderful raconteur, sharp-eyed and self-effacingly funny.

Chicago Tribune Offutt...is a shot of Kentucky bourbon, a writer whose distillations of life are spare and pure and breathtaking.

The Seattle Times Offutt's gift to readers is substantial.

Synopsis:

The author of The Same River Twice recalls his painful but ultimately revealing attempt to return home to the rural hills of Kentucky to give back to his hometown community and to record the personal story of his parents-in-law, Holocaust survivors who had emigrated from Poland in 1946. Reprint.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0684865521
• ISBN 13: 9780684865522
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272