Gilbert, Elizabeth. The Last American Man. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. 288 pp. Meghan Johnson
aegis 2007 154
In The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert invites readers into the life of Eustace Conway, a man whose mission in life is to return to nature. Not only is this a goal for himself, but Eustace also desires all people to make an effort to connect with nature and live a more simple lifestyle. Gilbert’s illustration of Eustace Conway became a National Book Awards finalist and was also a New York Times Notable Book. Gilbert explains the timeline of Eustace’s life: where he grew up, the differing styles in which his mother and father raised him, and the steps he took to achieve his current lifestyle. It didn’t take long for Eustace to realize that in order to live a simple life, he needed to preserve his own piece of wilderness. Growing up, he would familiarize himself with nature in the woods surrounding his home in North Carolina, when those woodlands were developed to provide more and more homes for people requiring more and more conveniences and distance from nature, he knew he needed to own his own land and save it from development and urban sprawl. This desire led him to acquire more than 50,000 acres in North Carolina which he calls Turtle Island. Turtle Island serves as more than just Eustace’s home and a nature preserve; he wanted it to be “the setting of a colossal utopian experiment in which he would try to do nothing less than change and save America.”(95) He has had groups of children and adults visit Turtle Island to experience nature and he even runs an apprenticeship program through the compound. People apply to “shadow” Eustace and learn to live off the land and be more nature-savvy individuals. Unfortunately, no one has been able to complete the entire program and usually ends up leaving due to the heavy work load or because they just cannot deal with Eustace’s impersonal and demanding personality. Eustace has such great plans and goals for himself and society but unfortunately he lacks the interpersonal communication skills to accomplish all that he has set out to do. Eustace’s main argument against modern society is that we are too absorbed in the conveniences and not in the basics such as nature and life itself. He differentiates his lifestyle from that of the typical modern American in that he lives in nature, where everything is connected, circular…The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. I don’t live inside buildings, because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in the real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they’ve stepped outside the natural circle of life. (18) This is an interesting perspective for how technology and other modern conveniences and
