The Last Great Road Bum, Hector Tobar
The Last Great Road Bum, Hector Tobar
List: $32.99 | Sale: $23.10
Club: $16.49

The Last Great Road Bum
A Novel

Author: Héctor Tobar

Narrator: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Unabridged: 14 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/25/2020


Synopsis

"Narrator Pabón delivers a top-notch performance of Tobar’s masterful blend of fiction and
nonfiction...Pabón's understated delivery allows listeners to make their own discoveries in this truly unique and intriguing story." -- Booklist

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.

A Macmillan Audio production from MCD

About Héctor Tobar

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the critically acclaimed, New York Times bestseller, Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Héctor is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He's written for The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, Zyzzyva, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jorge on September 17, 2020

I wanted to like this book. The premise sounded so good, but the story goes on and on forever and I lost interest half way through. It needed some good editing to pair it down. Perhaps there are two novels here. One about the road trips, which in themselves were problematic, because they are nothing......more

Goodreads review by vicki on April 03, 2020

"The Last Great Road Bum" is a book of fiction and nonfiction, culled together by Hector Tobar from world-traveler Joe Sanderson's lifetime of writing from the road. 18-year old Joe left his family's comfortable Champaign-Urbana, Illinois home in 1960 to explore the world and write his "great Americ......more

Goodreads review by Samantha on April 01, 2020

Snagged this galley at the PLA conference. Thank you! This turned out to be not quite what I expected. I went in thinking there would be more narrative to the “road bum” story, but that part of the story was quickly covered. More an intimate view of the Salvadorian Civil War. Not written like a “war......more

Goodreads review by Heather on October 06, 2020

Great concept but it lacked focus and most of the adventures felt meandering without much reflection or purpose. The section of the book where he was a guerrilla fighter especially felt like "joe enters village, witnesses horrible civilian deaths in graphic detail, leaves, enters new village" on rep......more

Goodreads review by Chelsea on November 04, 2021

:') He was annoying...but I didn't hate him. Well written enough to pull that off.......more


Awards

  • Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year