Two narratives intertwine in The Chenango Kid. One is the personal story of the author, Roger Miller, who grew up on Chenango Street, a main artery of the medium-sized industrial city of Binghamton, New York, in the 1950s. The second is the larger story of the 1950s. Each narrative enlarges upon the other. Many elements make up the personal: a devastating house fire; a single mother who liked to work and to frequent taverns; a father, mystified by life, less devoted to work than to benignly stalking his son; a half-sister long unknown; a drunken and/or crazy uncle or two; a boyhood paradise in the hills of Pennsylvania; and a passion for reading and art. All in all an unconventionally conventional working-class youth. The Chenango Kid also connects Chenango Street to the wider world of the Fifties, a vibrant, explosive decade in art, literature, music, movies, and television making it The Decade That Never Ends. The popular culture of no other ten-year span in the century continues to exert its influence as strongly or to be revived as often as that of the 1950s.

Inspired by a real person and true events, "Invisible Hero" is a poignant comingof- age tale in postwar America in the 1940s and '50s, when work is plentiful, cars are shiny, and the magic of television has just lit up the living room. Apart from the tragic loss of his father at a young age, Tim Davis's small-town life in Pennsylvania is charmed, blessed with simplicity, filled with honor, and essentially average by all measures.

But that life is brutally interrupted by the outbreak of a war whose cause is unclear, a war no one comprehends.

Tim is immediately drafted into the Army, enduring the aching separation from one love and the troubling remembrance of another. He is shipped to Korea and serves as a rifleman until he is captured by the Chinese and made a prisoner of war. From an innocent youth overwhelmed by the possibilities of love to a soldier grappling with the ugliness of a POW camp, this is what happens when a decent and good life is swept up by unseen forces.

"Invisible Hero" is a timeless-and timely-story about a changing world that somehow never changes.

Two narratives intertwine in The Chenango Kid. One is the personal story of the author, Roger Miller, who grew up on Chenango Street, a main artery of the medium-sized industrial city of Binghamton, New York, in the 1950s. The second is the larger story of the 1950s. Each narrative enlarges upon the other. Many elements make up the personal: a devastating house fire; a single mother who liked to work and to frequent taverns; a father, mystified by life, less devoted to work than to benignly stalking his son; a half-sister long unknown; a drunken and/or crazy uncle or two; a boyhood paradise in the hills of Pennsylvania; and a passion for reading and art. All in all an unconventionally conventional working-class youth. The Chenango Kid also connects Chenango Street to the wider world of the Fifties, a vibrant, explosive decade in art, literature, music, movies, and television-making it The Decade That Never Ends. The popular culture of no other ten-year span in the century continues to exert its influence as strongly or to be revived as often as that of the 1950s.

Inspired by a real person and true events, "Invisible Hero" is a poignant comingof- age tale in postwar America in the 1940s and '50s, when work is plentiful, cars are shiny, and the magic of television has just lit up the living room. Apart from the tragic loss of his father at a young age, Tim Davis's small-town life in Pennsylvania is charmed, blessed with simplicity, filled with honor, and essentially average by all measures.

But that life is brutally interrupted by the outbreak of a war whose cause is unclear, a war no one comprehends.

Tim is immediately drafted into the Army, enduring the aching separation from one love and the troubling remembrance of another. He is shipped to Korea and serves as a rifleman until he is captured by the Chinese and made a prisoner of war. From an innocent youth overwhelmed by the possibilities of love to a soldier grappling with the ugliness of a POW camp, this is what happens when a decent and good life is swept up by unseen forces.

"Invisible Hero" is a timeless-and timely-story about a changing world that somehow never changes.