Elizabeth Gilbert

Eustace Conway is self-sufficient in ways most of us wouldn’t want to be even if we knew how, in the way almost no American has been since the days of Daniel Boone. The star of Gilbert’s marvelous nonfiction The Last American Man lives on a thousand-acre patch of woods in Appalachia, literally living off the land and making his clothes out of deerskin. He’s a man born 200 years out of time whose soul belongs to the forest. And yet for all his supreme competency as a woodsman, his life is also a holding action against encroaching modernity—developers slowly encircle his land, and the bureaucratic vultures of taxation and insurance do too. Gilbert’s anecdotes are so colorful that they sometimes strain disbelief, and yet it would be a tremendous shame if they weren’t true. For instance: Once while climbing a mountain, Conway slipped and fell, rocketing helplessly down an icy slope toward certain death over a 2,000-foot cliff. He was saved at the last moment when his body slammed into the frozen carcass of a mule that had died within arm’s length of the cliff’s edge. Now that’s just too cool.