January 17, 2022
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.
March 1, 2022
McGrath, a staff writer at the New Yorker, sets out to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Richard Conant. When McGrath encountered Conant in 2014 on the Hudson River, near a small village north of New York City, Conant was in a plastic red canoe "packed as if for the apocalypse." A few months later, Conant's overturned red canoe was found by a group of fishermen in North Carolina; it was full of maps and other gear that suggested a long voyage, but no sign of Conant was found. Twenty years earlier, Conant had quit his job as a janitor at the VA hospital in Boise, bought a canoe, and launched his first river expedition to the Gulf of Mexico. For the next two decades, Conant canoed thousands of miles of American river alone, drawing on his naval experience to plan long excursions that required vast amounts of perseverance and courage. This investigation of the missing man's life was sparked by McGrath's initial encounter with Conant, which left the lasting impression of a man who--despite a life spent largely alone in nature--was always making new friends. VERDICT An intriguing character study for anyone interested in the life of a man with an adventurous spirit and an engaging personality, who collected friends across the country.--Gary Medina
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Starred review from January 1, 2022
The captivating story of an inveterate river wanderer who left a mark on many he met along his journeys before suddenly vanishing. An intelligent, heavyset "misfit," the artist and one-time hospital worker covered thousands of miles, logging his experiences in some 2,000 pages of text and reams of photographs before his disappearance, somewhere on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In this debut book, longtime New Yorker staff writer McGrath, whose chance encounter with Conant on the Hudson River eventually launched a lengthy retracing of the adventurer's travels, delivers a worthy combination of character study, travelogue, and missing-person's story. His portrait, partly propelled by Conant's own observations, also opens a portal to a world of itinerant men oft misunderstood as vagrants or ne'er-do-wells. More, it is a paean to eccentricity and endurance and a study of a life that changed the chronicler's own perceptions. McGrath's writing is measured and confident, the product of a journalist's persistence in investigating the truth behind so colorful and contradictory a figure. Skeptical at first of Conant's more implausible stories, McGrath became seduced, but he was too diligent a reporter not to wonder how much was romantic exaggeration or outright delusion. Conant could be erratic, even paranoid, but he was also genial. McGrath's accounts of his visits to many sleepy riverside towns in search of Conant's connections unveil a gallery of people no less curious than his subject. Small, telling details also set the book apart. Little escapes the author's gaze, though in the end he is just as mystified, and uncertain, as anyone over this elusive man's fate. The tone near the close is almost wistful. A memorable and intoxicating exploration of what we make of those who reinvent themselves.
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Starred review from December 1, 2021
In 2014, McGrath had a chance encounter with river explorer Dick Conant, who paddled by McGrath's house on the Hudson River. For decades, Conant lived a vagabond life holding a variety of jobs while traveling solo along major rivers and tributaries, and on this occasion, he had recently embarked on a waterway journey from Upstate New York to Florida in a 14-foot canoe. McGrath, a staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote a piece about Conant for the magazine; then in November of that year, he received a call from North Carolina officials because his phone number was found in the gear of a missing canoer. Conant's body never turned up, and he is presumed dead. Consulting Conant's journals and a wealth of documents found in storage, along with the help of Conant's family members and a host of friends and one-time acquaintances, McGrath retraces the remarkable life of this gentle man whose life on the water touched so many. Riverman honors a free-spirited American naturalist and modern-day explorer (a blend of Forrest Gump, Huck Finn, and even Don Quixote) who shucked a conventional lifestyle for complete freedom, at significant personal cost. A masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.
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