Hero's Journey

What makes a real hero?
Chip Hilton was an ideal hero for boys growing up in small Midwestern towns in the 1950s and 60s. Chip was the best athlete at his school, an A-student, loving son, and hard worker at the local drug store. He had a gang of loyal friends and was the star player on his high school teams. But Chip was just a fictional character in a series of sports-action books.
John Ritter was a real-live boy who seemed to be as close to Chip Hilton-like perfection as humanly possible. He grew up in Goshen, Indiana, to become a record-breaking All-Star basketball player and captain of Bob Knight's first Final Four team for the Indiana Hoosiers. But Ritter's life took a tragic turn to veer off its story-book script. The perfect boy became a homeless alcoholic.
Jeff Rasley's detective work to find out what happened to his childhood hero is the launch pad for a far-ranging study of how we create, treat, and mistreat our heroes. Hero's Journey taps voices as diverse as Patti Smith, Homer, Shakespeare, the Grateful Dead, and Dennis Rodman in an examination of the cultural shifts in the meaning of hero. The lustrous triumphs and pitiable travails of mythical heroes, like Achilles and Lancelot, are compared to ethical martyrs, like Gandhi and King, and to more troubling champions like Allen Iverson, Mike Tyson, Caitlyn Jenner, and Donald Trump.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell, building on the work of Freud and Carl Jung, explained how archetypal heroes are created in myth and out of legends. Hero's Journey discusses how the Hero Archetype has influenced American culture. Interwoven into the discussion is Rasley's memoir about his childhood heroes and the story of John Ritter's hero journey.
Our heroes exemplify the greatest human qualities and virtues, like courage, wisdom, and compassion. We will tear some of them down as false idols and knock them off their pedestals. Hero's Journey makes the case that we still need heroes, because real heroes reveal the best in us and point the way toward a better world.