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Turning Bones

Lee Martin author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Sep '03

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Turning Bones cover

The moving account of a family's migration over two hundred years and through six generations, imagined, reconstructed, and made to speak to the author, and to readers, of a lost world

Farmers and pragmatists, hard-working people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin's ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from birth certificates and gravestones. This is one man's story of love and compromise as he separates from his family's history.Farmers and pragmatists, hardworking people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin’s ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from the birth certificates and gravestones that marked their comings and goings, they left little written record of their lives. So when Lee, the last living Martin, inherited his great-grandfather’s eighty acres and needed to know what had brought his family to this pass and this point, he had only the barest of public records—and the stirrings of his imagination—to connect him to his past, and to his beginnings. Turning Bones is the remarkable story brought to life by this collaboration of personal history and fiction. It is the moving account of a family’s migration over two hundred years and through six generations, imagined, reconstructed, and made to speak to the author, and to readers, of a lost world. A recovery of the missing, Turning Bones is also one man’s story of love and compromise as he separates himself from his family’s agrarian history, fully knowing by book’s end what such a journey has cost.

“[A] lyrical, imaginative work. . . . [T]his ambitious work weaves together many strong, intriguing people, brought together by a skillful writer for a family reunion across time.”—Publishers Weekly
"A moving family history and cultural excavation."—The Virginia Quarterly Review
"Through white space, Martin guides readers through his tale of his family's past, as well as his own, in a captivating tale of love, heartbreak, and redemption."—Ashlee Clark, Ohioana Quarterly

ISBN: 9780803232310

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 431g

194 pages