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.

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.

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

 “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, Fast Food Nation
 
 “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, The Devil in the White City
 
“Ted Conover’s courageous reporting and vivid prose lend The Routes of Man an un-put-down-able momentum.”
            -Anne Fadiman, author, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
 
“Like a lot of people, I've spent a good deal of my life on roads, thinking about roads, and believing I knew a little bit about roads. Ted Conover's The Routes of Man pretty much demolished this belief. With its surfeit of fascinating information and beautifully and empathetically drawn characters, this book does what all great books do: It forces you to look at what is notionally familiar with new and better eyes.”
            -Tom Bissell, author, The Father of All Things
 
“Humans evolved on the road and we go on seeking territory, survival, wealth, and even knowledge. The Odyssey, Don Quixote, On the Road, The Road, Arabian Sands, Marco Polo on the Silk Road, wagon trains heading for California, and Latinos at the fence between Mexico and the U.S.A.—so many of us streaming toward vivid dreams. Buy this book and enjoy some armchair roaming (the second best way to travel). That’s my advice.”
            -William Kittredge, author, Hole in the Sky
 
“The roads traveled in The Routes of Man have this common destination—a story we wouldn’t have imagined ourselves but have been waiting to hear, told with extraordinary intelligence and empathy.”
            -Mark Singer, author, Somewhere in America
 
“With Conover’s keen observations and thoughtful meditations, I’d follow him just about anywhere—and this journey is as provocative and as discerning as it gets.”
            -Alex Kotlowitz, author, There Are No Children Here
 
“A work of tremendous research and imagination, The Routes of Man is a brilliant and poetic approach to human history and a meditation on civilization’s future.”
            -Melissa Fay Greene, author, Praying for Sheetrock
 
“Conover’s approach is on-the-ground, reported travelogue. He rides with reckless Chinese drivers; he sleeps in the cabs of Peruvian truckers; he walks for days on ice in Ladakh, India. Run-ins with police, thieves, and border guards attest to Conover’s down-and-dirty dedication . . . Conover is a master of first-person, immersion journalism; his road trips are both entertaining and poignant.”
            -Ethan Gilsdorf, The Boston Globe
 
“Graceful and evocative descriptions of some spectacular parts of the world allow the big questions about roads and what they do to people to steal into the reader’s mind almost unnoticed . . . [Ted Conover] has a wonderful eye for detail and the easy, unshowy style that marks the best travel writing . . . Like the hoboes he met on the railways and the Mexican migrants of his earlier book, 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
 
“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 . . . 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 . . . 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.”
            -Publishers Weekly