Solitary Men.(THE LAST AMERICAN MAN; SEA ROOM )(Book Review)

If you spent the last weekend in April at the Merlefest bluegrass festival in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, you may have run across a tall, handsome tepee dweller in buckskins. That was Eustace Conway, an idealistic Luddite who "heritage farms" his thousand-acre tract of Appalachian land using Mennonite machinery and knows how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Conway is an eater of roadkill and a tireless promoter of life in the woods, and he is also the anachronism around whom the novelist and journalist Elizabeth Gilbert builds her new book, THE LAST AMERICAN MAN (Viking). Conway, who rode his horse from Georgia to California in a hundred and three days and has studied most of the languages of the North Carolina Indian tribes, compares himself to a Stone Age man caught out alone in modern society. But, loosened up with a little whiskey, he ...