About book No Heroes: A Memoir Of Coming Home (2003)
I've had Renee's copy of this book for years, probably, and it never seemed like the right time to read it. After having gone home to Florida to help take care of my dad after his heart surgery, it finally seemed right. I go back every year for Christmas, but that's a special time. Florida in August is another kind of special. This book is about Kentucky.I guess none of that is about this book. Here goes. His writing is clean and spare but vivid. It expresses a range of sensations and emotions and thoughts. He does so much with relatively little. The way he writes about the people he grew up with--you can recognize them instantly as kinds of people you've also known. They are real and complex and interesting. He is compassionate but accurate.The teaching stuff rings true. It's hard to educate students on how to be educated. I have realized that myself. I don't know that I have dealt with the kind of endemic problems that he faced teaching at Morehead, but I do see the gaps in a student's education that it's not exactly my job to fix but that I can't help but try to fix if I want to get them further.I love his descriptions of the woods. I miss Florida so much. And I miss the people who understand what it was like to be a kid there, during a specific time.At first I didn't really understand the point of him including his in-laws' Holocaust memories and stories. And I shared his fear (which he mentions early on) that the book was disjointed and had no center. But it does. His kid figured it out. Upon reasoning out that if his grandparents never made it to New York after the war (if they've never been forced to leave Poland because of World War II), then his mother might have never met his father and so he might never have been born. So he has to love the Holocaust, or at least appreciate it, because he benefited and it arguably forms part of his identity. And that's the connection of everything. Offutt loves his past despite the outer world's rejection of it. He recognizes his own distance from that past now, but he won't turn his back on it. All at the same time, however, there's only an uneasy coexistence of his past, present and future. It's difficult, but not something to avoid. It's not about heroes and hugging and learning and growing and succeeding despite difficulty. It's just how "it" is. It's life, in all of its complexity, ridiculousness, despair, and love. He's got good love. Good for him.
Offut alternates between an account of the year that he moved back to a poverty- and ignorance-stricken area of Kentucky where he grew up and accounts of surviving the Holocaust by his Jewish in-laws. The two story lines don't always mesh, but he finds a few parallels and similar concerns with survival across time and far-removed places.Offut's style is very straightforward and blunt. Although I'm more of a lover of complex sentences and rich description, this style worked for this book. Sometimes the scenes are very humorous, even alongside all the sadness and horrible things he recounts. There's a humble tone that the author takes that I really appreciated. He seemed like he was growing up and coming down off his high horse as he wrote the book. Both failing at "coming home" (his children are miserable and getting a terrible education, so he decides to leave again) and listening to what his in-laws went through that they seldom complain about force him to realize how egotistical he's been.Overall, a good read.
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This book is unique. I enjoyed reading it (which I did when I was a student at Morehead State) because the author is writing about the Morehead area and MSU (which always makes the book a little cooler because you can say "Hey! I know where that is!")In the book, (which is a sort of memoir), Offutt comes back to to teach at MSU (He is originally from the Morehead area, but had been away for some time.) He also incorporates the story of his father in law, a holocaust survivor.I remember discussing this book with other students at MSU...many of whom were greatly offended by his portrayal of the area and of MSU students. (If I remember correctly...there is one part of the book where he tells about an MSU student who had never seen a dictionary.) This is interesting reading...especially if you went to MSU or are from the area.
—Amy
I really enjoyed Offut's narrative voice for the most part. He writes in a pretty simple, honest style that's never simplistic. In some ways, I would have liked a little more reflection on what made it hard for him to achieve his purpose in coming home and teaching at MSU; but in another way, this is just a book about the experience of trying and failing, not really a treatise on the sociology of an economically depressed area and what it would take to make a real change there. The weaving-in of his inlaws' Holocaust experience gives the book more weight than it otherwise would have and works pretty well as both a source of comparison and stark contrast to his own story. A good, accessible read with plenty to think about when you're done.
—Elizabeth
