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The Routes of Man

How Roads Are Changing the World, and the Way We Live Today

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.
Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Roads have unparalleled power to impact communities, unite worlds and sunder them, and reveal the hopes and fears of those who travel them.
With his marvelous eye for detail and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide. In Peru, he traces the journey of a load of rare mahogany over the Andes to its origin, an untracked part of the Amazon basin soon to be traversed by a new east-west route across South America. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. In the West Bank, he monitors highway checkpoints with Israeli soldiers and then passes through them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and danger borne by both sides. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their Himalayan valley to see how a new road will affect the now-isolated Indian region of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in car culture as highways proliferate across China. And from inside an ambulance, he offers an apocalyptic but precise vision of Lagos, Nigeria, where congestion and chaos on freeways signal the rise of the global megacity.
A spirited, urgent book that reveals the costs and benefits of being connected—how, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 4, 2010


      Reviewed by
      Jeb Brugmann
      In The Routes of Man
      , Conover, author of the NBCC award–winning Newjack
      , reveals globalization's neural system growing along the world's expanding and connecting road systems. Governments and smugglers, armies and insurgents, and the local poor and international NGOs negotiate their ambitions at border crossings, checkpoints, and dives. Tracing the route of rare mahogany from Peru's illegal jungle logging camps to Manhattan's brownstones, he examines how highways connect the fates of forests, untouched tribes, and finicky antique collectors. In the Himalayan frontier of Kashmir, highways are ventures of national territorial control, and in China a growing superhighway system underscores the disparity between the haves and have-nots.
      Conover's voice is that of a sobered Kerouac, tamed by a bigger conscience, and on an open road increasingly controlled by corporate, government, and military interests. His acclaimed narrative gifts are on full display in a wonderfully evenhanded treatment of the roadway in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Highways have been co-opted for Israeli settlements, and Palestinian professors, engineers, and migrant laborers construct ever-shifting back-road routes and taxi-hops to earn their living. With Conover as our guide, we move through Israeli checkpoints in Palestine's West Bank and witness the daily indignities faced by corralled Palestinian commuters and the psychological angst of Israeli soldiers. There is no open road here, just a gritty, fractured infrastructure of hatred that strangles both nations.
      More subtly, Conover reveals the highway as common social territory, particularly as the meeting place between men and women. His treatment of east African truck drivers—whose travels are suspected to be linked with the global spread of AIDS—avoids stereotype and sensationalism. He is as attentive to and interested by the drudgery of transporting goods as with the truckers' polygamy or encounters with sex workers and police bribery. We meet truck drivers who are true gentlemen and tough, articulate women fully capable of negotiating roadside life. Conover maintains a commitment to accurate portrayal and embraces the whole world, not only its dramatic aspects.
      The Routes of Man
      seeks to describe more than to explain this ever-connecting world. It does the former with an agility that leaves the reader anticipating the next adventure. But the narrative fails to build the argument posed in its subtitle: that roads themselves have become a source of change in the world, independent of the nations, armies, and cities that build, control, and fill them with trade and traffic. But this many-textured journey is not to be missed. Conover deftly navigates the romance and harsh reality of a world intent on a real and not just a virtual connectedness.
      Jeb Brugmann is author of
      Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World.

    • Kirkus

      December 15, 2009
      From National Book Critics Circle Award winner Conover (Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, 2000, etc.), a long view of global trade, empire building, cultural collapse, disease vectors and all the other things that come with the installation of a road.

      Even as the country fills with ever-wider highways—by some estimates, an area the size of Ohio is now given over to road asphalt—and the level of climate-changing particulates rises, other countries are rushing to add to their inventory of highways, especially aspiring China (which is"on course to equal us in cars" by about 2025) and India."We've reached the point where it seems nowadays as though we're paving the world," writes the author, and"it is hard to build without destroying" Conover hops behind the windshield to have a look, traveling vertiginous roller-coaster routes in the Andes that would make a condor flinch, but that also act to bind distant communities and bring much-needed goods to far-flung corners of what used to be the Inca Empire—communities served, in many cases, by roads the Incas built more than half a millennium ago, and that are doing better than their macadam descendants. Such roads bring desired goods out of the remote vastness as well—Conover traces the course of a load of mahogany from rainforest to Park Avenue. Elsewhere the author gazes through road-weary eyes at the adaptations people in the Himalayas have made to an absence of good roads—glacial ones will do, until the glaciers melt—and at the role of trucks and truckers in spreading AIDS throughout Africa. He even braves road journeys through China, where the traffic mortality rate is among the highest in the world.

      A readable, fact-filled, well-written exploration of how roads work, for good and ill, and what their future likely holds.

      (COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

    • Library Journal

      January 15, 2010
      The title is both a sexist throwback and inaccurate. This is "The Routes of Ted Conover." If you choose to go along with his travels, usually on roads, you'll learn that roads "not only connect but intersect" and that college gives you a more formal education than a road trip will. We learn that a rich Park Avenue couple will be buying lots of mahogany for their apartment flooring upgrade, a set-up apparently needed for Conover to go on a 50-page expedition into the Amazon jungle with Peruvians seeking mahogany trees to cut into planks. They use roads in their endeavors. Further random travels enable the author to give us disconnected simplistic lessons about AIDS in Africa (spread by truckers who use roads), military history (wars require roads), ecology (lots of animals get killed on roads), Israel and Palestine (it's very tense on those roads). The unifying theme is Conover and his travels to cover topics he's not an expert on. How'd he get so lucky? [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09.]Margaret Heilbrun (MH), "Library Journal"

      Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      February 15, 2010
      Roads bring medicine and disease, development and destruction, commerce and war. Curious about the impact of new roads on isolated places, immersion journalist Conover, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, rides in unreliable, body-battering trucks on harrowing roads in Peru to witness the illegal logging of mahogany trees, then, with all due irony, stays at a hotel for eco-tourists. In the spellbound Himalayan valley of Zanskar, he joins villagers walking down the only winter road: the frozen river. What will happen if India builds an all-season road? Is there a connection between truckers and the spread of AIDS in Africa? It seems so as Conover rides with a Kenyan truck driver who observes, The road is very unfair, very harsh. Road-to-hell stories of Iraq and Afghanistan are matched by chilling experiences at the checkpoints that block roads and destroy lives in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Convivial, intrepid, and happiest in motion, Conover tempers concerns about the paradoxes of roads with appreciation for the ingenuity and fortitude of the road warriors who welcome him into their arduous lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

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