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The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today |  | Author: Ted Conover
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
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Seller: BRILANTI BOOKS
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 39663
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400042445
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.1
EAN: 9781400042449
ASIN: 1400042445
Publication Date: February 9, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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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Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
 It's Hard To Build Without Destroying February 16, 2010
John Thorndike (Athens, OH United States)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
We love roads, and we come to hate them. "Anyone," writes Conover in his opening paragraph, "who has benefited from a better road--a shorter route, a smoother and safer drive--can testify to the importance of good roads. But when humans strive, we also err, and it is hard to build without destroying."
That contradiction, that tension underlies the book. A road from Peru's Altiplano into the jungle allows access to valuable mahogany trees, but also threatens primitive people and an established ecology. In East Africa, a road that is a clear economic boon to many has also helped the spread of AIDS, via truckers and prostitutes along its length. Roads are integral to development, and development can look disastrous.
There is nothing armchair about Conover's reporting. He clearly has a library and has read widely, but each of the six chapters is written from inside a culture, whether the author is zipping along the new highways of China or riding inside an ambulance through the teeming, chaotic city of Lagos, Nigeria. It's a book full of people, and the conflicts are inevitable. Why, a friend asks the author, would he go to Lagos, a city which Conover admits has "few museums, not too many antiquities, only a handful of public spaces or buildings of note, and stunningly little natural beauty. It does, however, have a reputation for crime, and lots of lots of people." Because people are interesting, Conover says, and "So is crime."
So are the politics of Israel and Palestine--and the chapter on the roads of the West Bank is the best piece of journalism I've ever read about that conflict. Conover explores the Israeli checkpoints in the company of both Palestinians and the Israeli soldiers who try to control them. It's degrading to both sides. The soldiers are looking for guns, explosives and suicide bombers, and most Palestinians are simply trying to get to work, or get home. Israel's management of the West Bank often comes down to restricting the travel of the Palestinians, and when Conover is in line with them as they move on foot toward a pair of turnstiles, "an exercise in gradual compression," the reader gets a visceral feel for their frustration and humiliation.
The soldiers don't like it either. "Innocent civilians...are inevitably damaged by the army's work in the territories," Conover writes. He spends weeks with an Israeli commander and his men, who not only run the checkpoints but sometimes tear up Palestinian houses in search of arms. It's bad for the families, the commander says, "But what's not plain until the fifteenth time is that it's bad for you."
Six fascinating travels interspersed with engaging personal essays: a great book.
Ideal Travel Companion February 27, 2010
Paul Austin (Durham, NC)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Ted Conover is the ideal travel companion. He seems equally comfortable standing in a swanky apartment in the Upper East Side, and tramping through the rain forest of Peru. In this book he takes us to places we'd otherwise never see: One day we're riding a mahogany raft down the Mother of God River in Peru, another day we're being herded through a dusty check-point in Ramallah. We get to know people we'd never otherwise meet: an African truck driver, teenagers from a remote Himalayan village, and an ambulance crew in Lagos, Nigeria. Roads connect these people. So does Conover's unerring eye for detail, and his pitch-perfect ear for language. This book is more than just an adventure: it's an invitation to understand each other and to know the world in which we live.
Well written and thought provoking March 6, 2010
Barry D. Mcgrath (los angeles ca usa)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I downloaded this to my Kindle after reading a positive review in The New Yorker.
Each of the pieces in this book have a different feel, all presented a different view on a subject I had read about many times before - the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the spread of AIDS and corruption in Africa, the emerging middle-class in China, the interminable violence on the West Bank and so on, but these stories give a much more intimate, personal feel to those stories, an opportunity to feel it up close - to give you a sense of personal experience.
The piece on the West Bank is one of the best pieces of reporting I have read in years.
Highly recommended.
Powerful Journeys May 21, 2010
Mark Stevens (Denver)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
With keen-eyed Ted Conover as your guide, "Routes of Man" offers up the best kind of non-fiction writing: the ride-along. The journey might be in a bus, in the back of an ambulance or in a Nigerian danfo (shared minivan), but for 302 fascinating pages you get to hear, taste, smell and sense Peru, India, Kenya, Israel, China and Nigeria. The idea of looking at how roads change cultures and alter civilization is brilliant. The execution is just as nifty.
If you're not familiar with the Conover style, you should be. His is the kind of effortless writing, reporting and anthropology that glides along. You breathe in moments by his side. In "Newjack," we spent a year with Conover as a Sing-Sing prison guard. In "Coyotes," we travelled with immigrants north from Mexico to the southwestern United States. In "Rolling Nowhere," we rode the rails with hoboes across the country.
In "Routes," the utter humanity continues to shine through --the people we meet along the way. Before we know it, we're drinking tea in simple huts in the Himalayas, we are paddling up river toward remote mahogany camps in the Amazon, and we are bombing around the countryside with Chinese businessmen who crave the speed, power and freedom that only a car ride can offer.
Each of the journeys is interspersed with mini-essays about roads and their meaning, impact and importance; these form a kind of glue to the global adventures.
What kick-starts the travels is Conover's open spirit. He minimizes reporting on the work it takes to set up these stories (one can only imagine) and jumps straight to the moment so we can spend more time inside the cultures being impacted by the encroachment from the routes of man. While the style is first-person, Conover slips in and out of the stories with ease, always shining the spotlight on his subjects first. The stories are at turns harrowing, funny, heartfelt, touching, terrifying (reckless speeding in China) or just plain tense ("area boys" in Lagos getting ready to attack your shared ride). Conover de-constructs border crossings in the maze around the West Bank, checks on the changes in how AIDS is perceived along truck routes in Africa, and takes us down a "road" that is for the time being a frozen (part of the year) remote Indian river.
The writing is uniformly rich and detailed, whether Conover is writing about the roads and the vehicles or the communities they lead to: "The village was an intriguing medieval warren of mud-brick houses three and four stories high, some whitewashed, uneven and irregular. Roofs were flat and often piled high with hay and the dried animal dung that fueled stoves; tattered strings of prayer flags fluttered over many. The ground level was devoted to animals: sheltered spaces where goats and oxen and dzos (a yak-cow mix) could spend the winter. Every day they were walked to water. Not all the houses were stand-alone; many adjoined others, sharing walls (and probably some heat). There was no electricity except for a few small solar-powered, fluorescent fixtures distributed by the government."
Go for a ride with Ted Conover and ponder changes wrought by the ever-increasing tentacles of intrusion--the changes that are roads (of all sorts).
Wow. I couldn't put it down. May 31, 2010
Jason Stokes (St. Louis)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Picked this up for a recent plane flight to Africa, thinking it would give me plenty to read on the way over. Unfortunately, I screwed up - as I read the entire book on one flight, and was stuck with nothing but cheesy movies and in flight magazines for the second flight. Bad for me, but good for my review of the book. I loved it.
Conover follows several "roads" throughout the world, and highlights the impact that these roads are having on the people. He typically withholds judgment and just tells the story, but at times it is clear that he is both thrilled by and challenged by the prospect of these roads. They open up new markets, allow people to buy and sell goods, and generally integrate people better into the capitalist, western culture. However, this is usually at some expense of their native culture - whether it is people in northern India, who for centuries have had to use a frozen river to access lands outside their own, or the burgeoning car culture of China - both are challenging what it means to traditionally live in those areas.
Overall, I was engaged and excited at many points. I found myself looking at roads in my area of Africa and imagining the impact they've had, as well as the roads back home. This book not only was an enjoyable read, it told a story that bears further thought and introspection.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
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