Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood - Softcover

Hertneky, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872332225 ISBN 13: 9780872332225

Publisher: Bauhan Publishing, 2016

Synopsis

Paul Hertneky is one of millions of baby boomers who fled the industrial north upon fulfilling his parents’ dreams of a college education. He returns to his roots in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in this collection of stories specific to one legendary riverfront plateau and one boy’s journey, but emblematic of immigrant life and blue-collar aspirations during the heyday of American industry and its crash, foreshadowing one of the largest internal migrations in U.S. history.

Table of Contents

A Turning Tide
Horns in the Hollow
Rust and Restlessness
Milk and Honey
Where Stories Went to Die
The Front Pew
Sanctuary
The Nation's First Economy
The Prurient Power of Pierogi
Life as They Found It
Rough and Ready, Tough and Tender
Moms Who Put Out
A Flame That Water Fed
Popularity, Politics, and Patronage
Humility and Its Opposite
Sure But Not At All Certain
Curiosity as Curse
Light and Nature
More Snoop Than Solicitor
Of Heroes and Helpers
Untethered
Dodging a Bullet
Itching All Over
Like Ambridge with a C
Rust: The Patina of Possibility
Rescue Amid the Ruins
Acknowledgments

About this title

About the Author:

Over 25 years Paul Hertneky has published in every medium. His work centers on culture, food, industry, the environment, and travel, winning him a Solas Award, and two James Beard Award nominations. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he serves on the faculty of Chatham University and lives in Hancock, NH.

Review:

"I loved it. I haven't read a book in many years that made me feel so wistful, and grateful, as Rust Belt Boy. Given my own family history--my grandfather was a Pennsylvania coal miner who barely spoke English, my grandmother ran a Prohibition era saloon on the banks of the Susquehanna River--I felt Hertneky was writing a love letter to my own boyhood, and at the same time a Dear John letter, telling me goodbye to all that. If you're one of the six million baby boomers who walked away from a dying hometown, read this book and remember another America."--Bob Shacochis, National Book Award winner and author of Pulitzer finalist, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

"The inside truth of a life, or a culture-of anything-cannot be tricked together. It has to grow from what's been bred in the bone and tested in the day's real living. Paul Hertneky's Rust Belt Boy has the savor of that living. It is a rueful, bittersweet expression of loss and a brave reenactment of memory."--Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies and The Other Walk

"Rust Belt Boy brings to life, in loving, lyric detail, an essential but overlooked portrait of America's blue collar heart. Paul Hertneky is a splendid writer, by turns hilarious, tough, and tender. He's always honest, often revelatory, and never disappointing; his book deserves to become a classic."--Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, National Book Award finalist

"[Hertneky] is honest, insightful, and empathetic about the rough life of many of the people who worked in . . . Aliquippa's steel works. . . . Most successfully, Hertneky depicts his own trajectory from the town to college and beyond in parallel with the history of Ambridge's."--Sy Montgomery, author of The Soul of an Octopus, National Book Award finalist "Publishers Weekly"

About this edition

• Publisher: Bauhan Publishing
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0872332225
• ISBN 13: 9780872332225
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224