The Last American Man

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.