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Riverman
An American Odyssey
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Descripción editorial
‘Brilliant, clear, and humane’ Elizabeth Gilbert
‘Miraculous and hopeful’ Emma Straub
Riverman: An American Odyssey uncovers the story of an extraordinary man and his puzzling disappearance, and paints a picture of the singular spirit of America’s riverbank towns.
‘The peace of mind I found, largely alone, on that white-water mecca convinced me that life was capable of exquisite pleasure and undefined meaning deep in the face of failure. The experience itself is the reward.’ Dick Conant
On his forty-third birthday, Dick Conant, a golden boy who never quite grew up as those around him expected, stepped into a homemade boat to embark on a journey despite a gathering snowstorm. Among his possessions was a Gideon Bible and biographies of Einstein and Bismark. It was the beginning of an all-consuming odyssey by an unconventional man into the watery arteries of America, a journey to the unreported margins of society. He was to spend the next twenty years canoeing thousands of miles of rivers and their innumerable smaller tributaries, from one end of the country to the other. ‘I can, and I will!’ he said. And then, in 2014, he disappeared.
Not long before Conant’s upturned canoe was found in a brackish North Carolina bay, Ben McGrath met Conant by chance as he paddled down the Hudson, headed for Florida. McGrath set out to find the people whose lives, like his own, had been touched by their encounter with the great river wanderer. Along the way he meets eccentrics and ne’er-do-wells drawn straight from the pages of Mark Twain, a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting.
Riverman is the story of a restless soul who was as troubled as he was charismatic, a contemporary folk hero who slips the moorings of ordinary civilised life to tap into what Thoreau called ‘a yearning toward all wildness.’ It is also a riveting portrait of an America we rarely see: a nation of unconventional characters, small river towns, and long forgotten waterways.
About the author
Ben McGrath is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He lives outside New York City in a small town on the Hudson, with his wife and two children.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Yorker staff writer McGrath debuts with the mostly riveting though sometimes meandering story of his search for a solo traveler and canoeing enthusiast who went missing in 2014. The author met Dick Conant shortly before his disappearance and wrote a story about the itinerant "river wanderer" who, at the time, was traveling by canoe from Canada to Florida. After Conant disappeared in North Carolina, McGrath set out to find him and learn about his life, the quest taking him to meet Conant's brothers, who supplied him with Conant's journals, from which he learns of Conant's time in the mountains of Tennessee and in Bozeman, Mont.—in the end, McGrath writes, "I have tried here to make Conant the hero of his own epic, while not giving anyone the illusion that it was an enviable life." McGrath is strongest when describing his own investigative work—his vivid descriptions of the places he visits and the people he meets hum with life, and he offers fascinating insight into the craft of writing a story about an elusive subject. His language sometimes tends toward the grandiose (Conant is "a Studs Terkel of the riverbank," with "a touch of Whitman in his eclectic erudition"), but those with a soft spot for accounts of rugged individualism will be enchanted.