FROM OUR EDITORS

Novelist and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert tells the compelling story of one Eustace Conway, a self-made "throwback" who deserted suburbia to make his way in the Appalachian Mountains, where he's lived for twenty years now. What made him do it, and is he successfully convincing others to follow his lead?

ANNOTATION

Nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography/Autobiography.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In The Last American Man, Gilbert explores the true story of Eustace Conway, who left his comfortable suburban home at the age of seventeen to move into the Appalachian Mountains, where for the last twenty years he has lived, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he trapped, and living off the land. A charismatic and romantic fgure, both brilliant and tormented, brave and contradictory, restless and ambitious, Conway has always seen himself as a "Man of Destiny" whose goal is to convince modern Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. Gilbert tells of Eustace's crusade and his extraordinary wilderness adventures, including his 2000-mile hike down the Appalachian Trail (surviving almost exclusively on what he could hunt and gather along the way) and his legendary journey across America on horseback." To Elizabeth Gilbert, Eustace Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of what we feel our men should be, but rarely are. From his example, she delivers a look at an archetypal American man and - from the point of view of a contemporary woman - refracts masculine American identity in all its conflicting elements of inventiveness, narcissism, isolation, and intimacy.

FROM THE CRITICS

Booklist

[a] spirited and canny portrait...

New Yorker

If you spent the last weekend in April at the Merlefest bluegrass festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you may have run across a tall, handsome tepee dweller in buckskins. That was Eustace Conway, an idealistic Luddite who "heritage farms" his thousand-acre tract of Appalachian land using Mennonite machinery and knows how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Conway is an eater of roadkill and a tireless promoter of life in the woods, and he is also the anachronism around whom the novelist and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert builds her new book, The Last American Man (Viking). Conway, who rode his horse from Georgia to California in a hundred and three days and has studied most of the languages of the North Carolina Indian tribes, compares himself to a Stone Age man caught out alone in modern society. But, loosened up with a little whiskey, he resorts to modern slang ("That's why they pay me the big Benjamins!" he says in response to a compliment from Gilbert), proving that he is as much showman as frontiersman.

Prehistoric diversions are about the only kind on the Shiants, Adam Nicolson's private islands in the Hebrides, off the coast of Scotland. "Shiant" means "holy" or "haunted" in Gaelic, and in Sea Room (North Point), Nicolson tells of discovering an Iron Age house, an early Christian hermit's stone pillow, and traces of his Viking ancestors, who are believed to have first landed there in the ninth century. Since that first settlement, the islands have changed hands many times, but they came back into Nicolson's family when his father bought them for £1,400 in 1937. The book is Nicolson's farewell to the Shiants, which he plans to give to his son when he turns twenty-one. (Dana Goodyear)

Publishers Weekly

"By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree." Such behavior might qualify Eustace as a potential Columbine-style triggerman, but in Gilbert's startling and fascinating account of his life, he becomes a great American countercultural hero. At 17, Conway "headed into the mountains... and dressed in the skins of animals he had hunted and eaten." By his late 30s, Eustace owned "a thousand acres of pristine wilderness" and lived in a teepee in the woods full-time. He is, as Gilbert (Stern Men) implies with her literary and historical references, a cross between Davy Crockett and Henry David Thoreau. Gilbert, who is friends with Conway and interviewed his family, evidences enormous enthusiasm for her subject, whether discussing Conway's need for alcohol to calm down; his relationship with a physically and emotionally abusive father; or his horrific hand-to-antler fight with a deer buck he was trying to kill yet she always keeps her reporter's distance. At times, Conway's story can be wonderfully moving (as when he buries kindergartners in a shallow trench with their faces turned skyward to help them understand that the forest floor is "alive") or disconcerting (as when, in 1995, he's uncertain about Bill Clinton's identity). Gilbert has a jaunty, breathless style, and she paints a complicated portrait of American maleness that is as original as it is surprising. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews