This book is the part family memoir and part biography of Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow's longtime friendship with Bill Coperthwaite (A Handmade Life), whose unusual life and fierce ideals helped others examine and understand their own. It is also a story about the tensions and complexities of mentorship: the opening of ones life to someone else to learn together, and carrying on in their physical absence.
A Man Apart is also a remembrance of the life, and death, of Coperthwaitea homesteader and social critic in the lineage of Henry David Thoreau and Scott Nearingand an account of his decades-long experiment in living on a remote stretch of Maine coast.
