Discover America's Heart and Soul: Bob Hill's 'Out Here' Celebrates Unforgettable Characters and Journeys in a Touching Memoir

From Old Stone Press, this collection intertwines memorable encounters with icons and everyday heroes, highlighting Hill's distinct and engaging storytelling style.

LOUISVILLE, Ky., Nov. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- In his 33 years at the Louisville Courier Journal, columnist Bob Hill wrote 14 books and more than 4,000 columns, using humor, whimsy, truth, passion, needed newspaper deadlines, and his sense of place to portray the lives, deaths, triumphs—and losses—of communities and their people.

His latest book is "Out Here," a memoir with favorite columns that covers a career that began at his hometown weekly newspapers in rural Northern Illinois, writing in long hand with a pencil. He went on to cover the World Ice Skating Championships in Czechoslovakia and spent time with Muhammad Ali as he leaned over a Quran at a big table in his mother's home in Louisville.

He journeyed into the Eastern Kentucky mountains, where he met a woodcarver forever trying to make his own casket, but his neighbors kept buying them. He walked the Western Kentucky hills with the elderly son of slaves, trying to find his parents' tombstones. Add meeting with the protective caretakers of Elvis Presley's boyhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi, a night walk up Butcher Hollow to Loretta Lynn's Kentucky home, and the view from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

Hill's job diversity included time spent in the bare surroundings of an Indiana nudist colony, meeting a man who divorced his mute, long-paralyzed wife following a car accident and then adopted her, and watching the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington debate capital punishment for a 17-year-old Louisvillian.

Famed Kentucky author, poet, and farmer Wendell Berry wrote to Hill: "This book is not recommended for people who need to quit reading and go to work. OUT HERE is clearly the place for you."

The late Peabody Award winner and NPR legend Bob Edwards, who was born in Louisville, said: "If I wrote like Bob Hill, I could get a job with decent hours. He looks like a macho, trench-coated reporter of another decade, but his prose gives him away."

Hill received the Ernie Pyle Legacy Award from his fellow journalists at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He played basketball at Rice University in Houston and was offered the position of top sports columnist at a major league newspaper covering the World Series, Super Bowl, and NBA finals. He understood the possibilities. but preferred to stay "Out Here" in mid-America, living in an 1860 farmhouse on an eight-acre arboretum he and his wife created in Southern Indiana while raising their two children.

Hill is available for any radio, TV, or print media interviews. He has also created a PowerPoint presentation from Out Here and would be available to speak to large groups.

OLD STONE PRESS specializes in the art of publishing single-author books, complicated or highly illustrated "coffee table" books. They are based in Louisville, Kentucky. https://oldstonepress.com/

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SOURCE Old Stone Press