This oversized book chronicles its subject’s’ remarkable journey from an illiterate child of the 1870s to an unlikely motivational speaker who lived to age 110.

Walter Casey Jones was America’s most independent super-centenarian, a man who lived entirely on his own terms until an accident claimed him at 110, just as national fame beckoned. Philip F. Tennyson’s biography, which took four decades to complete, was built from hours of tape-recorded conversations. Tennyson edited the tapes but allows Jones to tell his own story, preserving the old man’s home-spun eloquence. “[T]here used to be an old sayin’, a man didn’t have good sense until he was forty,” Jones says, recounting tales of youthful altercations. “There’s a few of ’em that never reach it, regardless of how old they get.”

Jones represents something increasingly rare: a man who witnessed the country’s evolution from horse-drawn carriages to a modern landscape littered with chain stores (“You get to a town along the road, it’s all the same, McDonald’s, K-Marts, Safeway, Walgreens, and so forth”).

Walter’s storytelling meanders across decades, dispensing hard-won wisdom in every paragraph. Yet beneath all the rambling are quieter moments that reveal the actual person behind all that unstoppable positive thinking. At one point, for instance, he recalls his preoccupation with glimpsing a man with amputated limbs: “An experience from the past, that comes back and just won’t let go.”

Jones emerges as a quintessentially American folk hero—a man who lived 11 decades on his own terms. His unfiltered voice makes this book special, but also frustrating: Reading the book cover to cover can be challenging, given its unstructured nature.

Nonetheless, whether you believe every word of his tales or not, there’s something undeniably powerful about hearing this voice from another era, still preaching hope from the driver’s seat of a beat-up motor home. Readers of Studs Terkel’s oral histories and anyone drawn to uniquely American stories of self-reliance and reinvention should appreciate this offering.