The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today

While Conover examines troubling issues that road-building can entail--pitting development against environmental concerns, or isolation against connectivity and possible erasure of local cultures, for example--it is his strong sense of lifes clock ticking all around him that lifts his reporting above the ranks of travel-as-usual literature . . The building of new roads provokes mixed feelings for the wilderness that they replace and the never ending question of whether this is really progress. Roads change landscapes and both add and detract from the lives of the people nearby. In rich detail Ted Conover explores six routes and the impact of new roads. Included are just a few powerful pictures and thankfully some maps. But its not just the geography and economics: he keeps a strong focus on the hopes and fears of those who travel these routes. In Peru, a load of rare mahogany makes its way over the Andes from an untracked part of the Amazon basin... He hitches rides in unreliable, body-battering trucks on narrow winding roads up the sides of mountains then boats down backwaters to witness illegal logging. Finally, he stays at a hotel for eco-tourists. But a new east-west route across South America will soon cross this whole area changing everything. In India, he walks for days on ice down a frozen riverbed with teenagers escaping their cul-de-sac Himalayan valley for more education: most will seldom return. Conovers high tech cold weather gear contrasts with the maroon goncha robes of the older men and then blends into the transitional garb of girls in traditional colorful garments and pink sneakers and boys in jeans and parkas. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels have been linked to the worldwide spread of AIDS. One cant help but like Obadiah who in his own words is the best driver there is. Border bribery, the plight of women in the sex trade, and Ugandas green hills are part of the story as are the many uncertain causes of death. In the West Bank, Conover witnesses the injustices as Palestinian commuters wait in the sun at checkpoints, change cabs, sneak through yards, and are mysteriously detained. Roads for Israelis only divide not only farmers from their fields but the country from lasting peace. Then with Israeli soldiers Conover monitors the same checkpoints and rides on night patrols always alert for rock throwing, guns, and bombs. The weariness and hassle of it all exhausts and fascinates the reader at the same time. The Chinese road trip is lighthearted after Israel. This modern version of a caravan delights in the freedom of the open road (but without the US infrastructure for refueling, eating, and sleeping. Miles pile up as reckless drivers ride the shoulders and ignore both speed limits and police. No wonder Chinese highways are the deadliest in the world. But twelve hours at the wheel is fun for these guys: individuals in China have owned private cars only since the turn of the millennium. Lastly are the roads are in Lagos, Nigeria where bumper-to-bumper traffic a go-slow becomes an instant market and armed robbers and driving at night are synonymous. This huge immensely crowded (and still growing) African city has redefined traffic chaos. From inside one of only twenty-one ambulances in the city the reader gets a look at life in a global megacity. Even rush hour in Houston is looking good. Conovers reporting is close to the ground. One cant help but think that he is a brave guy with intestines of steel who, more than a few times would have really liked a long hot shower. But he largely keeps himself to himself focusing instead on the people and cultures being impacted by the encroachment from the routes of man. I dont want to be rude, he says at one point but I really would like to live to the end of this trip. Its an eye opening and entertaining read.

There is no cover page or table of contents in the kindle version (there are both of these in the hard copy) so I cant easily move back to the notes or bibliography while Im reading. The maps are nearly illegible except when I get out a magnifying glass. this book needs to be read in hard copy.

Great book! The author is courageous to the nth degree in an understated, mindful sort of way.

Very interesting read by one of my favorite authors. If youre an armchair traveler or road trip enthusiast, its worth checking out this book.

Very interesting and varied travelogue as travelogues go. The author should be commended for his selection of roads around the world and his accounts of how he traveled them. I only wish he would have included the road between Brownsville Texas and Guatemala through Vera Cruz with its hundreds of caravans of Central Americans transporting used pickup trucks and appliances back to their hometowns. As the author points out, roads are much more than a way of getting from one point to another. They lower the cost for farmers of getting their produce to markets. They facilitate access by isolated populations to enhanced life improving services. And then there is the negative - oil well and mining penetration roads almost always promote deforestation and as the author points out, the spread of vices and diseases such as HIV.

Since its really difficult (or impossible) to read maps on a Kindle, the Kindle edition for a book like this is just too expensive.

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 youre 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, were 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 Conovers 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).

Ted Conovers The Routes of Man, is a first-person narrative of six separate road journeys. Three of the road tales take place in Asia, two in Africa and one in South America. Conover deftly separates each of his road tales with a bridge chapter, a short chapter focusing on the history of roads. One such example is a history of the extension of political and military power, cultural influence and the technological innovations of Roman Roads. His first journey begins in Peru where he seeks to find answers to the logging of mahogany in the Amazonian part of Peru where virgin mahogany trees still grow and are logged--legally and illegally. His second journey is to the high mountains of northern Kashmir, a border region where India, Pakistan and China come together. This is a cold, alpine clime; the road journey is actually a hike through a high mountain pass. Beware travelers, a modern road is coming soon and with it, will come the loss of local culture, history and tradition. There is sadness as the loss of local culture and history is imminent. His journey to East Africa is along a trucker road across Kenya into Uganda. He teams up with a trucker on a route that has become notorious in the spread of AIDS. His quest to find answers to the spread of AIDS is the quixotic Holy Grail of this journey. Conovers journey into the occupied West Bank and into Israel proper is tragic for what Israel has succeeded in doing: isolating and de-humanizing Palestinian people in their own land. A road system along with a so-called security fence has effectively produced an apartheid in which the Palestinian people cannot easily tend to their sheep and goats, prune their olive trees, visit with friends and relatives or simply get to work. For Palestinians, this cleverly designed road system has truly segregated an entire people. Conover evenhandedly narrates the difficult situation Israeli soldiers face at what are called checkpoints, a mix of permanent, semi-permanent or temporary military garrisons along the roads where Palestinans who need to travel face searches, long-lines and dehumanizing treatment. In China, Conover narrates a journey along a network of rapidly developing highways that within the next quarter-century are likely be overwhelmed with automobiles. Government policy has stated a goal to unite the nation to bring the outer parts of China (Tibet and Xinjiang) into the modern Chinese state. Modern high-speed highways will undoubtedly accelerate the Sinification of the country by the dominant Han Chinese. In this journey, Conover hooks up with nouveau riche Chinese members of a Beijing-based auto club who take a club-led road trip into the interior of China and visit among other sites, the nearly-complete Three Gorges Dam. Conovers last journey is to Lagos in Nigeria. No need to say more than this would not be a destination for people who fancy a driving vacation holiday. Good read! Five stars.

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 wed otherwise never see: One day were riding a mahogany raft down the Mother of God River in Peru, another day were being herded through a dusty check-point in Ramallah. We get to know people wed 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 Conovers unerring eye for detail, and his pitch-perfect ear for language. This book is more than just an adventure: its an invitation to understand each other and to know the world in which we live.

The subject is huge (roads, the biggest thing people have built) but the approach is specific, even intimate: Conover gets at the big story by telling smaller stories, and puts you right there-in the Hyundai, in the Humvee, in the Himalayan winter. Its an adventure story but its not macho, its human.