Menu
Maybe someday
40
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
20/100Critics
60/100Scholars
Author:
Ben McGrath
Publisher:
Knopf
Date:
April 5, 2022
The story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than 20 years, solo canoed thousands of miles of American riversâand then in 2016 disappeared off the coast of North Carolina.
What The Reviewers Say
If the missing-person element provides the current that sweeps Riverman forward, the book amounts to much more: a portrait of forgotten American byways and the eccentric characters who populate them, a cursory history of river travel in America and, not least, an effort to solve the riddle of Conant himself — not only his whereabouts but also his elusive and irresistible nature. As a chronicle of perseverance and inchoate questing, this quietly profound book belongs on the shelf next to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.
Mr. McGrath knew a good story when he saw it. He had stumbled upon an archetypal American outsider, a brilliant, sociable, sensitive misfit whose journeys harked back to America’s early romance with rivers.
Fascinating.
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..
