‘Brilliant, clear, and humane’ Elizabeth Gilbert, author of
Eat, Pray, Love ‘Miraculous and hopeful’ Emma Straub, author of
All Adults Here ‘Quietly profound … belongs on the shelf next
to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild’ New York Times 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.
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