Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"A readable, fact-filled, well-written exploration of how roads works, for good and ill, and what their future likely holds." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"[Ted Conover] has a wonderful eye for detail and the easy, unshowy style that marks the best travel writing....Mr. Conover here has taken an unpromising subject and turned it into a book that is about far more than just the strips of tarmac that criss-cross the world." The Economist
Review
"Ted Conover is one of the great writers of my generation, and this may be his finest book. Fearless and compassionate, with echoes of Conrad and Kerouac, it explores how the road, once a symbol of limitless possibility, has become a path to annihilation. I have enormous admiration for what Conover has achieved." Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation
Review
"Ted Conover's exploration of six far-flung 'roads,' from a truck route over the Andes to an ambulance crew's rounds in Lagos, Nigeria, will prove a delight, while at the same time serving to remind that in many places of the world the act of getting around is an art marked by pride, lust, corruption and bloodshed." Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City
Review
"Ted Conover's courageous reporting and vivid prose lend The Routes of Man an un-put-down-able momentum." Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Review
"When I traveled to the struggling ski-resort town of Davis, West Virginia, this past winter, all the locals I met seemed to want to know how I had gotten there. They talked about the highway that has been inching their way for years. Most looked forward to the flood of tourists and prosperity they thought the project would bring, but others saw only the prospect of unwelcome change. Although Ted Conover writes about far more exotic places than hardscrabble West Virginia in The Routes of Man, he sees its conflict everywhere: The coming of new roads distills the modern dilemma over progress and its discontents." Steven Lagerfeld, The Wilson Quarterly (read the entire Wilson Quarterly review)
Synopsis
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Newjack comes an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.
About the Author
Ted Conover is the author of several books including Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. He lives in New York City.