the last american man book review

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Eustace, king of the wild frontier

A merica, like Bonnie Tyler, needs a hero. "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer." I - in other words - am your answer. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

In a culture built on the cult of the individual there will always be those - cowboys, cops, gangsters, film stars, businessmen, even politicians - who inspire in others awe, worship and praise. Eustace Conway is one such blessed individual. The subject of Elizabeth Gilbert's unashamedly hero-worshipping biography, Conway might at first seem like the very opposite of President-elect Obama. A modern-day frontiersman who lives in a tepee and teaches "primitive living" skills to young people on his Turtle Island nature reserve in North Carolina , Conway is in fact the archetypal all-American hero. Just as Homer's Achilles was, according to the Iliad, "the best of the Achaeans", so Eustace Conway, Gilbert would have us believe, is the best of the American male: courageous, noble, ruthless, glamorous, and - need one add? - tragic.

In Gilbert's skilful, if at times rather self-conscious and breathy, telling of his life story, Conway conveniently fulfils all the criteria for the traditional role of hero. He is, for example, male (Gilbert makes much of his complicated romantic life). Like Jesus, he is preceded by legends that proclaim his imminent arrival (Gilbert knew Conway's brother, Judson, before getting to know Eustace, and so had long heard the stories of this wilderness-loving wild man). His childhood is troubled (epic battles with an authoritarian father; encouragement from a free-spirited mother). He is possessed of unusual strength and skills ("By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree"). He constantly embarks upon grand quests and journeys (travelling the Mississippi, aged 18, in a handmade wooden canoe; crossing America on horseback). And he wears weird clothes (his trademark buckskin shirt, for example, which he made by shooting a deer, skinning it, softening the hide with the deer's brains, and then sewing the parts together using the poor animal's sinews).

Conway was born in suburban South Carolina in 1961. His mother was, in Gilbert's typically zippy turn of phrase, a "tomboy horseback-champion able-bodied woodsman". His father was a chemical engineer with a PhD from MIT. Young Eustace was wild at heart, and when he finished high school he started travelling with his tepee and living an admittedly slightly outdated version of the American Dream. "He sewed all his own clothes. He ate nettles and hunted small game with a Cherokee blowgun, using darts made from sticks, thistledown and strands of deer tendon. He carved his bowls and plates from wood polished with beaver fat."

Gilbert, meanwhile, had been busy reinventing herself as a "western cowgirl" even though she was from Connecticut. She first meets Conway in New York, where he turns up wearing handmade buckskin clothing and carrying a big knife. The New Yorkers call him "Davy Fuckin' Crockett". Gilbert is in awe: "He has perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect balance, perfect reflexes and perfect focus."

He is also, as it turns out, a pretty savvy businessman. Conway's theory, according to Gilbert, is that "the only way modern America can begin to reverse its inherent corruption and greed and malaise is by feeling the rapture that comes from face-to-face encounters with ... 'the high art and godliness of nature'". Getting up close and personal with nature takes cash, however, and it's only through sheer hard work and a lot of wheeling and dealing that Conway managed to buy up tracts of land in North Carolina and set up his extraordinary frontier community (turtleislandpreserve.com).

There is of course a downside to the heroic, as anyone married to a hero could presumably attest. One woman who lived with Conway for years, and whom Gilbert dutifully interviews, reports: "He was obsessed with making money, with buying land, with success, and he was always on the road. It got to the point where I never saw him. The only time we spoke was when he gave me orders."

When people apply to become apprentices at Turtle Island, they are given a memo titled "Re: Relationship with Eustace". It reads: "Please don't expect to develop a close friendship with Eustace or be disappointed by anything other than a working boss, leader and director-type of friendship. People are attracted to aspects of Eustace's warm and generous personality and often want a more personal contact than can be expected." There is no doubt that Conway has achieved something truly momentous. The price of heroism, however, as Obama may be about to discover, is everything.

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THE LAST AMERICAN MAN

by Elizabeth Gilbert ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2002

Backing her on-the-ground account with asides on communal movements, idealistic failures, and our deeply flawed culture,...

An absorbing, sometimes strange profile of the last of the back-to-the-landers, if not the last “real” man.

In this rare instance of a magazine-article-turned-book that works, novelist Gilbert ( Stern Men , 2000) expands a GQ feature on latter-day mountain man Eustace Conway to address a range of cultural-historical topics, blending bookishness with roll-in-the-dirt intrepidity. To be sure, Conway is a strange bird: a teenaged runaway from the home of a perfectionist, uncommunicative father and apparently repressed mother who spent 17 years living in a tepee, eating squirrel soup, and fending for himself in the wilderness, he’s the living embodiment of Robert Bly’s Iron John ideal—except he’s the real thing, and not just another urban wannabe. A bundle of contradictions, Conway has renounced most aspects of American consumerism while amassing a backwoods empire of more than a thousand acres in the North Carolina mountains that he calls Turtle Island, a fleet of battered trucks, and a small army of followers, nine out of ten of whom do not long endure his weird boot-camp regime. Conway’s “coolest adventure,” one that gained him national media coverage, was a cross-country trip on horseback that took him to Indian reservations, black and Chicano ghettoes, and well-groomed suburbs alike. The author is no latecomer to Conway’s story; she first got to know about him more than a decade ago, when she cowboyed with his brother in Wyoming. She excels at capturing Conway’s inflexibility and inability to keep friends, his “man of destiny” monomania, and his superbly honed, altogether rare skills. Though Gilbert clearly admires Conway, she writes of him with complexity and nuance: “It can be mortifying to learn that life at Turtle Island is grueling and that Eustace is another flawed human being, with his own teeming brew of unanswered questions.”

Pub Date: May 20, 2002

ISBN: 0-670-03086-4

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002

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by Elizabeth Gilbert

edited by Elizabeth Gilbert

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

From mean streets to wall street.

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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The Literary Edit

Review: The Last American Man – Elizabeth Gilbert

I’ve been a big fan of Elizabeth Gilbert ‘s ever since I read Eat Pray Love – her bestselling memoir that followed her post-divorce journey as she ate, prayed and loved her way through Indonesia, Italy and India. Having since read both Big Magic and Eat Pray Love Made Me Do It – both of which were equally as inspiring – and having been lucky enough to see her in Sydney as part of Sydney’s Writer’s Festival, it’s safe to say I am just one in a legion of fans she has amassed during her writing career.

I’d never heard of The Last American Man – and came across it quite by chance on a fairly sparse bookshelf when in a local bar in Bondi one Friday evening with friends. And so, with a stretch of weekend ahead and nothing better to do, I decided to spend my precious time off with Elizabeth Gilbert and The Last American Man.

Like the three previous books of Gilbert’s I’ve read, The Last American Man immediately invites its reader into another world – and whether it’s to a world beyond the boundaries of fear, an Indian ashram or the American outback – Gilbert does it with great verve. The Last American Man explores the true story of Eustace Conway, who left his comfortable suburban home at the age of seventeen to move into the Appalachian Mountains. Over the next twenty years he dealt with heartbreak, hunger and an army of interns; desperate for the knowledge Eustace had acquired during his time in the wild, few of them lasted the two year term.

Not too dissimilar to Into The Wild – though albeit without the sad ending – The Last American Man is a great exploration of a life lived beyond the conformities of society and will inspire its readers to not only question the importance of materialism, but to turn to nature for its many healing powers.

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The Last American Man

Finalist for the National Book Award 2002

In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family’s comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway’s mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.

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THE LAST AMERICAN MAN

By Elizabeth Gilbert.

271 pp. New York:

Viking. $24.95.

AS Elizabeth Gilbert makes vividly clear in ''The Last American Man,'' it is almost impossible for man or woman not to fall under the spell of Eustace Conway. He is a woodsman, a hunter, an apparently irresistible lover and a visionary utopian. He can do anything: hunt, fish, ride across the United States on a horse, build houses, buy real estate and captivate an unruly teenage audience by simply speaking softly and telling how he lives. When he wears his buckskin clothes in New York City he is hailed on the street as if he is pretending to be Davy Crockett. He takes no offense, and proceeds to explain to a group of crack dealers how he killed the deer and tanned its hide to make his shirt. In his opinion, as Gilbert writes, most modern Americans are ''so removed from the rhythms of nature that we march through our lives as mere sleepwalkers, blinded, deafened and senseless. Robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body and atrophy the soul.'' Yes! Hallelujah! You can fairly hear modern eco-Americans drinking in this indictment with a thirst bordering on spiritual longing. Yes, Eustace, we are indeed numbed. Wake us please.

That, as Gilbert explains in this wickedly well-written and finally pain-filled biography, is just what Conway -- a self-created mountain man who runs a camp and educational center in North Carolina called Turtle Island -- wants to do. It is what he should be uniquely qualified to do, having lived on his own in the woods since the age of 17 and having acquired both charm and book learning along the way. If he is Davy Crockett, however, he is living in the postmodern era, and in Gilbert's story he is both hero and goat, Davy Crockett deconstructed. Conway is uniquely hobbled, as she tells it, in his chosen life, in a way that is inordinately sad. It is tragic, in fact, in the strict sense, since he is, on his own, larger than life, and since in Gilbert's narrative he carries great historical weight. ''The history of Eustace Conway,'' she writes, ''is the history of man's progress on the North American continent.''

His flaw is a crippling one. He is indeed powerful, smart and charismatic. Nor is he ever anything less than honest or authentic in his dealings with others. He does indeed know how to live in harmony with the natural world, and desperately wishes to lead an entire nation to the same goal. It is other people he has trouble with. As Gilbert draws his character, Conway simply cannot tolerate a harmony in which different voices blend. Everyone must sing the same tune in his chorus. Discussing his difficulty in finding people who can function well at Turtle Island, he says: ''People get mad and say, 'Eustace thinks his way is the only way.' Well, that's true. My way is the only way. And I believe the best work is done when people surrender to one authority, like in the military.'' He continues, ''If I was the general of an army, for instance, the discipline would be more organized and I could insist that everyone do exactly what I said, and then things would run properly.'' This is a grown man speaking, with no trace of humor or self-deprecation. He could probably survive if dropped naked into any forest in North America, but he is, as any 10-year-old could tell you, completely clueless.

There are two parts to ''The Last American Man'': Conway's personal story, which is fascinating enough, and the way it entwines with the American preoccupation with robust, can-do masculinity, at home in the woods. Gilbert, the author of a short-story collection, ''Pilgrims,'' weaves the two together to present Conway as a paradigm of American manhood -- or at least of one dream of American manhood. Much of this rings true, but there is one connection that is troubling, and that is Conway's childhood. As Gilbert describes it, his youth was an excruciating mix of idyll and nightmare. On the one hand, he ran free through glorious woodlands and was taught many of his outdoor skills by an adoring mother. But there is a father in this story as well, big Eustace, who punished, mocked and tormented his son. At the age of 2, for instance, little Eustace could not do a jigsaw puzzle. Gilbert writes: ''As Mrs. Conway remembers, her husband went crazy on the kid. 'He started screaming at him and saying terrible things.' The child, horrified and confused, was howling at the top of his voice, and when Mrs. Conway tried to intervene, her husband screamed at her, too, for spoiling the baby and encouraging him to be a quitter and an imbecile.''

Things got worse after that. Little Eustace entered a world in which he was in constant terror. An aunt remembers the elder Conway waking up his 4-year-old son late at night and bringing him down to throw math questions at him for the amusement of his guests, mocking him until he wept, ''at which point the aunt left the room, thinking she could watch no more of this, thinking it 'sadistic, the worst abuse of a child' she had ever witnessed, and promising herself that she would never return to this house again.''

At 17, Eustace left home. ''He . . . headed into the mountains, where he lived in a tepee of his own design, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, bathed in icy streams, and dressed in the skins of the animals he had hunted and eaten.'' After such a childhood, ice water must have felt like the cool hands of angels.

Gilbert suggests that many old mountain men and pioneers may have also fled tyrannical fathers, that the American man of fable and memory was running away from home as much as he was chasing a frontier. No doubt true, but the treatment of young Eustace as she describes it (and these are all living people, who may have their own thoughts about the portrait she paints) is child abuse, plain and simple, which his brothers and sisters did not have to endure. He alone suffered his father's singular cruelty, in Gilbert's account. ''Eustace remembers -- and his mother and siblings confirm -- an upbringing that was more like a stint in a P.O.W. camp than a real childhood. If little Eustace so much as touched a hammer from Big Eustace's toolshed without asking permission, he would be sent to his room and forced to stay there for hours without food and water.'' The classic American man may have fled west after escaping from a harsh father, but this is something else.

Given this start in life, Conway's accomplishments, his joy and vigor, seem almost miraculous. He is indeed intoxicating in his strength, his resourcefulness and his will to pursue not merely survival but beauty. But his weaknesses emerge inevitably. He is driven to achieve, to proselytize, to educate. It's no surprise that nobody can measure up. In the end, he sounds more and more like his father. Women leave him time and again because he cannot stop telling them what to do and how to do it. His brother, who rode across America with him, says, ''The bottom line's the same -- he has to get his way all the time, and there's no talking through it.'' In describing one of his troubled love affairs, Gilbert describes an internal war between ''the two things he craves most: absolute love and absolute control.'' If he is indeed the model of a certain kind of American manhood, it is one more sad than thrilling.

The book ends on a bittersweet note with Conway happily embracing nature in the midst of his difficulties, but it might end with another scene, at the end of his horseback ride across America. This was a ride in which Conway pushed and pushed himself, his horses and his companions to cross the continent as fast as possible, an obsession with speed strangely at odds with his notions of finding a harmonious relationship with nature, and yet, as one observer of his exploits suggests, perhaps closer to his true nature. At the end he rides straight into the surf, with tears in his eyes. Over the next week, he kept riding, ''every day, all day long, up and down the beach.'' He was, Gilbert says, ''facing down the undeniable limitation of the Pacific Ocean, and dealing with the geographical reality of his personal Manifest Destiny: that there was nowhere else to go. The country dead-ended right here. It was over. If only another continent would appear out of the sea so that he could conquer it, too.''

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Book Review: The Last American Man

By Sam Jolman | November 26, 2008

Meet Eustace Conway through the eyes of author Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, the Eat Pray Love writer). Eustace is a brilliant charismatic naturalist still alive somewhere in the woods of North Carolina. It seems odd to have a biography of someone still living, unless they’ve been a president or overcome some amazing obstacle to accomplish some grand feat. I guess in that regard, Eustace Conway is the later.

You don’t have to read too long to learn that Eustace has accomplished much with his young life. He survived in the woods for a week at age 12 without bringing food or shelter with him. At age 17 he hiked the Appalachian Trail doing 30 miles a day in sneakers and a loin cloth. Almost without catching his breath, he was on to kayak Alaska and then to living with the most primitive tribe he could find in Guatemala. And just for adventure sake, he galloped across America on horseback and set a new record for the fastest trip from coast to coast by horse. And that’s not to mention his daily life of living in a teepee, running a full nature camp, making his own clothes, and eating road kill. Eustace Conway has indeed done a lot of amazing things.

And all of this is killing him because none of this is getting him the thing he wants most – his father’s validation and love. Eustace Conway has a massive father wound. This is his greatest obstacle. It almost bleeds off the page. Some parts of the book are absolutely heart breaking. Here is just a taste of the words his father uses to obliterate his son. “You are so stupid. I’ve never met a child more dimwitted. I don’t know how I could have sired so idiotic a son. What are we to surmise? I believe you are simply incompetent and will never learn anything.” (p.30) Daily, methodically, deliberately his father bludgeoned his son with similar tirades.

Like everything else in his life, Eustace has put herculean efforts into pleading with his father for some relief, some validation, some love. From age 12 to the present, he has written letters to his father as penance and petition for mercy. Well into adulthood, he wrote: “I have an overwhelming need to be accepted by you, to be appreciated, acknowledged, recognized for something better than trash… I have a great void where I look for love. All I have ever wanted is your love. Perhaps I should accept defeat and stay away from you. But denial and distance do not satisfy the need for your acceptance” (p.105). His father has never responded to any of his letters.

If you’ve ever wondered at the impact of a father’s love on a man, read this book and have your heart torn in two for Eustace Conway. You may find new eyes, new curiosity, new compassion for your own story and the stories of the men in your life.

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After all this time working together I didn’t even know you had a blog. Excellent insight Sam!!! Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it.

I’ll take a look at this book. It looks like a good one.

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'The Last American Man'

NPR's Alex Chadwick talks with writer Elizabeth Gilbert about her new book, The Last American Man. It's a true story about a modern-day Daniel Boone who's living off of the wilderness and asking America to join him.

The Last American Man

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In this rousing examination of contemporary American male identity, acclaimed author and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert explores the fascinating true story of Eustace Conway. In 1977, at the age of seventeen, Conway left his family's comfortable suburban home to move to the Appalachian Mountains. For more than two decades he has lived there, making fire with sticks, wearing skins from animals he has trapped, and trying to convince Americans to give up their materialistic lifestyles and return with him back to nature. To Gilbert, Conway's mythical character challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be a modern man in America; he is a symbol of much we feel how our men should be, but rarely are.

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At the age of seventeen, Eustace Conway ditched the comforts of his suburban existence to escape to the wild. Away from the crushing disapproval of his father, he lived alone in a teepee in the mountains. Everything he needed he built, grew or killed. He made his clothes from deer he killed and skinned before using their sinew as sewing thread. But he didn't stop there. In the years that followed, he stopped at nothing in pursuit of bigger, bolder challenges. He travelled the Mississippi in a handmade wooden canoe; he walked the two-thousand-mile Appalachian Trail; he hiked across the German Alps in trainers; he scaled cliffs in New Zealand. One Christmas, he finished dinner with his family and promptly upped and left – to ride his horse across America. From South Carolina to the Pacific, with his little brother in tow, they dodged cars on the highways, ate road kill and slept on the hard ground. Now, more than twenty years on, Eustace is still in the mountains, residing in a thousand-acre forest where he teaches survival skills and attempts to instil in people a deeper appreciation of nature. But over time he has had to reconcile his ambitious dreams with the sobering realities of modernity. Told with Elizabeth Gilbert's trademark wit and spirit, this is a fascinating, intimate portrait of an endlessly complicated man: a visionary, a narcissist, a brilliant but flawed modern hero. The Last American Man is an unforgettable adventure story of an irrepressible life lived to the extreme. The Last American Man is a New York Times Notable Book and National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.

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The Last American Man Paperback – Bargain Price, May 27, 2003

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin (Non-Classics)
• Publication date May 27, 2003
• Dimensions 7.64 x 5.38 x 0.52 inches
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000MG1Z9C
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin (Non-Classics); No Edition Stated (May 27, 2003)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.64 x 5.38 x 0.52 inches
• #3,985 in Men's Gender Studies
• #21,435 in Deals in Books
• #163,544 in LGBTQ+ Books

About the author

Elizabeth gilbert.

Elizabeth Gilbert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love, as well as the short story collection, Pilgrims—a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 1999 John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award-nominated journalist, she works as writer-at-large for GQ. Her journalism has been published in Harper's Bazaar, Spin, and The New York Times Magazine, and her stories have appeared in Esquire, Story, and the Paris Review.

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