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

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, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. 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.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Let's face it: it's hard to write a book about infrastructure. The ties that bind us together are enormously complex but difficult to make interesting. The sewer system of New York is collapsing as we speak, but who cares? Garbage dumps? Highways? What a snooze. That's why Ted Conover's book about roads -- by turns philosophical, witty, and hang-onto-your-seats adventurous -- is such a tour de force. Conover's premise: that roads, a basic human tool, are, like any tool, ambivalent. Paths of contact and openness also destroy old cultures and ecosystems. Routes that connect us also make us vulnerable. But Conover, who began his career following hoboes in Rolling Nowhere, doesn't merely philosophize, he travels. Traversing six of the world's most contested roadways, he offers travelogues from India to China to Peru to and back to Park Avenue with such zest and intelligence you'll find yourself becoming an infrastructure junkie, too. We follow mahogany -- that coveted, endangered rain forest export -- from Park Avenue deep into the Amazonian camp where it is illegally harvested. On this journey -- by bus and truck and bicycle scooter and boat -- Conover retraces a treacherous byway that both supports and exploits impoverished people, and threatens the rain forest that supports our planet. Following tribal Buddhist school children on an icy canyon out of the Himalayas, we watch a people struggling to make room for new industry and wealth while preserving a time honored long isolated culture. Conover doesn't so much solve the problems he finds as pose them wisely, leaving us open to their dangers and possibilities. We leave our journey renewed, feeling how the mostfamiliar parts of our world can also be its most puzzling.