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 hiked in the wilds of Australia and 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.
