The Last Great Road Bum
Description
One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville's Favorite Books of 2020.
In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a "road bum," an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson's freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador--a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live--a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.Product Details
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About the Author
Reviews
Praise for The Last Great Road Bum
Tobar's stunning follow-up to Deep Down Dark . . . [features] high-velocity prose that is both relentless and wry . . . achieves a version of Kerouac for a new age. --Publishers Weekly
Praise for Héctor Tobar
"A riveting story...[but] why it's an extraordinary book is because of Héctor Tobar's writing, which is so beautiful and so thoughtful that he's taking on all of the big issues of life: what is life worth, what is the value of one human life, what is faith, who do we become in our darkest hour? He really brings this story to a level that I don't feel anyone else could have done . . . It's the best book of the year." --Ann Patchett, NPR's Morning Edition on Deep Down Dark
"Hector Tobar's The Tattooed Soldier brings the enmities of the Guatemalan civil war to the L.A. riots." --Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times on The Tattooed Soldier
"[Tobar] succeeds in bringing into focus both the civil turmoil that racks Guatemala and the inner turmoil that can consume people anywhere." --People, on The Tattooed Soldier
"A triumph . . . Crosswires de Tocqueville's Democracy in America with Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries." --Steve Erickson, New York Times Book Review, on Translation Nation
"A book of extraordinary scope and extraordinary power." ?Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times, on Barbarian Nurseries
"[Tobar] exhibits a seismographic sensitivity to the tensions along the fault lines of his cultural terrain . . . His illuminations become our recognitions." ?Rebecca Donner, The New York Times Book Review, on Barbarian Nurseries
"Both timely and timeless . . . Tobar continually creates moments of uncommon magic." ?Elle, on Barbarian Nurseries
