Gather Round the Campfire with NOLS NYC's November Reading Group

Join the NOLS-NYC Book Group at the Half King on Wednesday, November 16th at
7:00 to discuss Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man.  The Last American Man was a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Notable Book in 2002 by The New York Times.  Scroll down to read the review.

*** PLEASE RSVP TO LET ELYSSA EAST KNOW IF YOU PLAN ON ATTENDING.

TITLE: The Last American Man

AUTHOR: Elizabeth Gilbert

PUBLISHER: Penguin: Reissue edition (May, 2003)

WHEN: Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 7:00 pm

WHERE: The Half King
503 West 23rd Street at 10th Avenue

TRANSIT: E/C to 23rd Street or M23 Bus

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Gather ‘Round the Campfire for Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man

If Eustace Conway III, the subject of Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2002 nonfiction book-length profile The Last American Man, had his way we’d all be eating nuts, seeds, and berries; sporting loin cloths of buckskin; and living like primitive man in harmony with the earth, but not in that hippy-dippy way you’re imagining.  We’d shoot the deer that provided the buckskin and cure the hide with its brains.  We’d also dumpster dive and salvage road-kill or even, possibly, a dead cat for dinner.  We’ll be so swayed by Conway’s Davy Crockett-like looks and utterly convinced that he is the real thing, we’ll move into teepees and relinquish power tools and trips to Home Depot and follow his stringent philosophy of subsistence-based living, all in the name of saving the earth. 

While Conway is single-handedly converting you, me, and everyone else from crack addicts in Tompkins Square Park to an African American family enjoying their back-yard reunion—which he crashes on horseback during a record-breaking coast to coast ride—he’ll be pining away to sire thirteen children with some beautiful bohemian chick. By the end of Gilbert’s book, Conway, nearing forty-years old, won’t have any kids or a romantic partner, but he will have roped one of his girlfriends into riding 2,500 miles across the Great Plains and into Canada in a horse-drawn buggy.

Gilbert recounts these and other adventures from Conway’s life and vision with the skilled craft and humor of the best campfire storytellers. She expertly places her protagonist in a larger context of iconic American masculine archetypes, utopian visionaries, and self-consciously crafted pioneer characters such as Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Along the way, she carefully exposes Conway’s vanities, weaknesses, and ironies—he may live in a teepee, but he dreams of big, walk-in closets. But Gilbert never ridicules her subject.  She draws a full portrait of a complex and captivating character with an astonishing drive and a list of remarkable, if not absurdly visionary achievements.  Though The Last American Man is laugh out loud funny, the care with which Gilbert tells Conway’s life story brings us in touch with the full scope of one man’s struggle to realize a utopian dream. The Last American Man was a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Notable Book in 2002 by The New York Times.  It will no doubt become a classic of contemporary nonfiction writing.