Quick Take
- Narration: MacLeod Andrews brings a wry, understated warmth to Plennie Wingo’s story, matching the material’s balance of absurdity and genuine pathos without overplaying either.
- Themes: Depression-era desperation, American eccentricity, the performance of optimism
- Mood: Quirky and melancholic, with a social history backbone
- Verdict: An ideal listen for anyone who loves narrative nonfiction with an unusual protagonist and a richly rendered historical moment.
I finished this one on a Sunday evening in November, the kind of gray afternoon where staying inside with headphones feels like the only reasonable thing to do. I had picked it up partly because of the premise, which is genuinely absurd, and partly because Pulitzer Prize finalist Ben Montgomery has a reputation for finding stories that illuminate American history through unusual angles. The Man Who Walked Backward delivered on both counts, though not quite in the proportions I expected.
Plennie Wingo was a Texas restaurant owner who lost everything in the Depression. In 1931, having exhausted more conventional options, he decided to walk around the world backward, wearing mirrored spectacles to see where he was going and hoping to earn money through sponsorships and media attention. He made it from Fort Worth to Istanbul before political upheaval and dwindling funds ended the attempt. Montgomery uses Wingo’s journey as a spine on which to hang a vivid account of the Depression-era world that produced such spectacles: people living on flagpoles, pushing peanuts up Pikes Peak, enduring dance marathons. Wingo was not unique in his desperation. He was unique in his particular form of responding to it.
Our Take on The Man Who Walked Backward
What Montgomery does well is maintain genuine sympathy for Wingo without sentimentalizing him. One reviewer noted discomfort with the fact that Wingo left his wife and child to pursue this stunt, and that tension is present in the book. Montgomery does not resolve it neatly. Wingo is adventurous and self-promoting and a little irresponsible, and the narrative holds all of those qualities at once. A reviewer called it part biography, part lively social history, and that ratio is roughly accurate, though the social history sections occasionally pull focus from Wingo himself in ways that feel more like obligation than necessity.
Why Listen to The Man Who Walked Backward
MacLeod Andrews is a narrator who excels at this kind of material: narrative nonfiction with a specific, slightly eccentric subject and a journalistic prose style. His pacing through the German and Turkish sections is particularly good, calibrating the comedy of Wingo’s reception abroad against the growing menace of the political landscape he was walking through. These passages, where the mirrored-spectacles man from Abilene is crossing a Europe sliding toward catastrophe, have an almost surreal quality that Andrews handles with exactly the right restraint. A reviewer compared Wingo’s journey to Forrest Gump, and while that is a bit reductive, it captures something real: Wingo has a habit of wandering through history-making moments without quite understanding what he is witnessing. That quality gives the book some of its best scenes.
What to Watch For in The Man Who Walked Backward
The critical review in the sample raises a fair point about Montgomery’s assessment of Wingo feeling incomplete. The book is generous with historical context and somewhat more reserved about psychological interiority. We get a clear picture of what Wingo did and a reasonable picture of why, but some readers may want more sustained engagement with who he actually was as a person, beneath the stunt. The final chapters, which follow Wingo’s later life after his return, feel slightly compressed relative to the detail devoted to the journey itself. These are the kinds of structural choices that come with any narrative nonfiction undertaking, and they are minor relative to what the book achieves. Montgomery is an excellent writer, and the Depression-era material is consistently absorbing.
Who Should Listen to The Man Who Walked Backward
Listeners who enjoy the social history nonfiction tradition, writers like Erik Larson or David Grann, will feel immediately at home here. It also works well for anyone drawn to American eccentricity as a subject in its own right. At just under nine hours, it is a manageable listen that rewards sustained attention more than dipping in and out. Those looking for a straightforward biography of Wingo may want to manage their expectations; the book is as much about the world he walked through as the man himself.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much of the audiobook covers the actual backward walk versus Depression-era history?
The two are interwoven throughout. Montgomery uses Wingo’s route as a structural spine but regularly zooms out to the broader historical context of the Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the political situation in each country Wingo passes through.
Does the audiobook cover what happened to Plennie Wingo after he returned home?
Yes, though briefly. Montgomery follows Wingo’s later life in the final chapters, including a later backward-walking attempt in his seventies, but the bulk of the narrative is devoted to the 1931 journey.
Is this appropriate for listeners who are not especially interested in sports or adventure travel?
Absolutely. This is primarily a social history and biography. The physical feat of walking backward is the hook, but the substance is historical and character-driven rather than athletic.
How does MacLeod Andrews handle the passages set in Germany and Turkey, where foreign language names and places appear frequently?
Andrews navigates the international sections smoothly, and his pacing adjusts well to the tonal shifts between the American and European portions of the journey.
