The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
Author: Ted Conover
Desc: 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.