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Loading... No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home (edition 2002)by Chris Offutt
Work InformationNo Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home by Chris Offutt
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I probably enjoyed this more than some others might, simply because of the Kentucky connection. It's not great literature, but Chris Offutt has an easy style of writing that I found interesting and pleasant. The three intertwined stories about his current life, his childhood, and his in-laws' experiences during the Holocaust worked for me because it seems as if we all are dealing with different aspects of our lives all the time. ( ) This is a memoir about a year that Offutt spent trying to return to his Kentucky home, teaching at Morehead college. He alternates between stories about his life, and about Kentucky culture; and interviews with his in-laws, who were Polish Holocaust survivors. The combination didn't quite work for me, even though parts of it were interesting. no reviews | add a review
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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