Very interesting story I'd never heard of. Not my favorite writing style but it was extremely interesting and something I look forward to sharing with readers.

I missed the download window on this title, but it's a topic of great interest to me. I look forward to checking this title our from the library or purchasing a copy in the near future.

I appreciate the generosity of authors and publishers in making titles available for readers to review in advance of publication.

I found the story to be interesting, although the flow of the story did venture somewhat outside the bounds at times, and left me wondering when we would return to the main story. A good suggestion for those who enjoy books along these lines.

Started off interesting, following Joe on his globetrotting travels and adventuring from his teenage years through his 30s, but quickly decelerated once we got to El Salvador. The Salvadoran war took up WAY too much of this book and went on WAY too long, with minute details that didn't add much to the story and really killed the momentum. This book did make me miss the formerly ubiquitous practice of letter-writing, and the writing/language skills this seemed to develop in most everyone.

This was a really interesting post-modern take on the road novel. This is a fictionalized telling of a man, Illinois-bred Joe Sanderson, who traveled the world to fuel his desire to write fiction. While he was never published, his voice (as interpreted by the author) now shows up in he footnotes of his story to push back against the liberties the author takes to shape his narrative. And in further post-modern goodness, this is a classic road novel (a la Kerouac), but (by showing where the Sanderson traveled) it captures the relative privilege it takes to be able to travel and shows the ultimate emptiness of the traveling impulse (Sanderson never found what he was looking for on the road and never found a story he was able to tell). It also shows his growing sense of injustice and they way he sees how so many people across the globe are exploited and oppressed. But even when Sanderson found a "home" and a "purpose" among the rebels fighting injustice in El Salvador, the author (a American-born child of Salvadorian immigrants) highlights how aimless and wasteful and pointless war is. I also loved including the perspectives of Joe's family who miss him and fear for him and wonder what he is doing with his life. I'm not sure what you do defines a life fulfilled or wasted (at this point in my life I'm still not sure what that means other than to love and be kind and learn and tech and try to push the boulder of goodness uphill), but I can say I really enjoyed this straightforward, tangled, intriguing, honest, mendacious novel.

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 than an enumeration of the places the main protagonist visits, with some notable exceptions about Jamaica, Guiana, Vietnam and Biafra. The other story about the civil war in El Salvador. I wish the characters had more depth and were better developed. It was frustrating to read it at times. I almost DNF, but in the end did finish. I cannot recommend this book. Copy courtesy of Macmillan through NetGalley.

Joe Sanderson, man of contradiction placed in the heart of so much upheaval.. Utilizing his extreme privilege, Joe parachuted into conflict the world over, balancing idealism and selfish ambition. Harvesting ideas for his own book, Joe saves the lives of others, holds children while they are dying and eventually picks up arms himself. He never writes that book, and spends much of his later life helping those who can't help themselves. But is he a hero?

That's what the book addresses in trying to cobble together his life from fiction and nonfiction. Using the pseudo-autofiction style also used by Dave Eggers to great affect in What is the What, Tobar manages to get at the heart of the great contradictions to American foreign policy at a micro-level.

The title "The Last Great Road Bum" is the perfect title for this historical fiction book about Joe Sanderson's short, but impactful life. Hector Tobar used Joe Sanderson's notes and voice to help tell the story of his trips and adventures around the world. Sanderson couldn't stay in one place for very long as he searched for meaning and place he could make a difference. Family was extremely important to him, and as he traveled, he wrote long detailed and very coded letters to his parents and brother. He discovered later that he could use his life skills to help fight the unjust world in El Salvador. Joe was known by many there by his looks, but had many names to protect his identity while assisting and sometimes leading the abushes.

The novel was sometimes a bit wordy, but also gave you a deep sense of what he was experiencing and witnessing throughout his many escapades. It was fascinating to witness the political awakening through Joe Sanderson's eyes during the 1960's through the 1980's.

Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for allowing me to listen to this book for an honest review.

I read the blurb and thought it sounded like it would be an interesting listen. I greatly underestimated what an incredible listen this book would be. Its part biography, part travelogue, part supposition by the author all put together via interviews with many who knew Joe Sanderson and the letters written by Joe to his mother who loving saved each and every one received. Hector Tobor, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist has created a wonderful listening/reading experience. Joe Sanderson was born to roam, explore, go places he had no business being and yet went anyway. After a short stint in college he knew there was more out there for him. He had wanderlust. Standing still, staying on one place was not part of who he was. His curiousity and ability to be a chameleon got him into places he truly had no business being and doing things he was not formally trained in, but managed to learn to help and get along. He literally traveled from war to war. From Vietnam as a “journalist”, Korea, Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, all over South America as a reporter, a doctor, a soldier and so much more. He reasoning was that he wanted to write a book to document all that he saw and experienced. Sadly, as we know from the onset, that did not happen, but through the words of Hector Tobar we get to experience travel at a time when hitch hiking was a common and seemingly safer way to travel, there was no social media, we only learned what was on the news after it had been sanitized if reported on at all. His journey was interesting, scary, brave, at times crazy and he loved each and every moment and experience no matter how scary and difficult the experience. Somehow je managed to fit in Even knowing what would ultimately happen I cried so be sure to have some tissues. This is a story that any and everyone should experience. I am so very grateful for the experience.

Tobar has recreated the real life of Joe Sanderson, who spend his short adult life bumming around the world. Using a trove of Sanderson’s journals, unpublished novels, and letters, Tobar has recreated the journeys and thoughts of a young guy from Urbana, Illinois who lusted for more. Joe’s thoughts flit from here to there, but always giving us a view of the new places he is exploring. He has a wide range of experiences from his early stay with Rastafarians in Jamaica to a wild road trip with Chileans in South America to experiencing the famine in Biafra. As he travels, the reader is privy to the reason he became a radical and eventually end up with guerrilla fighters in El Salvador. It was with this group that he died in combat at the age of 39. In listening to the audiobook, I was torn between wishing Sanderson would grow up and being jealous of his courage to explore new worlds and new points of view. The audiobook narrator was particularly adept at language accents of the various people he met around the world, and in the conversations Joe, himself, inserted questioning what the author of the book was doing.

Tobar's fictionalized account of a man who actually existed and ended up going the guerrilla in El Salvador is an interesting one to delve into, even fascinating, but I found myself losing patience with the idea of Sanderson being a forever naive kid. Perhaps it's just a narrative I've grown tired of over time. The mix of fiction and non-fiction was interesting, but perhaps I was hoping for a more critical perspective beyond the idealist, naive American who takes up arms in an adventure in Latin America.

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was a completely unique blend of fiction and nonfiction, as the author-journalist writes The Great-ish American Novel that Joe Sanderson had set out to do by traveling the world and participating in wars.

"The Last Great Road Bum" is part biography written as a fictionalized memoir and part journalism. Don't write the novel off based on my messy description - it is a very unique piece of meta fiction, but as a curious reader, I really enjoyed the challenge.

It was for sure a fun read and listen (I did both at the same time! Highly recommend!) as the author delves into Joe Sanderson'a great wrold travels he set out to do in the 1960s. The narrator did an incredible job with this audiobook and made sure that nothing was confusing despite the format. However, I wish the author went deeper into a few parts of the story and less so into the war memoir.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free advance copy of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.