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

This book examines the culture that exists around the road, because of the road. All of the journeys Conover undertakes and the people he meets are directly influenced by the roads they travel. This book is about how culture changes with different types of roads. I think it is clear that Conover prefers lots of culture to high speed travel that good roads bring (see the section about India and the rural teacher who comments on too much culture), and therefore creation of a transoceanic highway would destroy a fragile culture balance that exists in the Peruvian Andes, something that he would like to revisit but feels will be gone before he or anyone else can make it back. Thanks, Mr. Conover, for allowing us to travel with you and showing us what to look for in our travels.

Ted Conover must be an amazing dinner companion. Hes managed to write an entire book about fascinating adventures without once bragging about how adventurous he is. The modest tone aside, this is a really neat book. I heard of it shortly after a heated discussion with a friend about the pros and cons of development, including roads, in the developing world. Through visits to several very different places, Mr. Conover addresses many of the questions Ive been pondering: the loss of ancient culture vs. the arrival of modern advantages... the spread of disease vs. the ability to treat it... the inevitability(?) of inequality vs. the chance to raise the standard of living of a whole population. The book is essentially a travelogue, full of first-person impressions and the voices of people Mr. Conover met on his journeys. But its also illuminated and deepened by secondary research and, thanks to the authors willingness to acknowledge his own biases and speculations, one of the most balanced pieces of non-fiction writing Ive read in a long time. (BTW, I agree w/the critics at Bookmarks Magazine--the subtitles a little misleading. It kind of makes it sound like this will be an academic treatise on global interconnectedness, and so I had certain expectations for this book that werent met. But actually, that turned out to be a good thing. It was _better_ than I expected it to be!)

When I started reading The Routes of Man I thought it was going to be about famous roads in civilization. I was mostly wrong. It’s actually a very engrossing modern day worldwide road trip. Conover is an interesting guy and in The Routes of Man he takes the reader to many of the most desolate, dangerous and delightful places on Earth and introduces us to some of the individuals who live there. He travels the most remote roads and rivers of Peru to explore the illegal mahogany harvesting occurring there. From Tibetan ice river treks to the new “self-driving clubs” enabling wealthy Chinese to drive the brand new roadways to the hellhole called Lagos Nigeria, Conover strives to provide the character of the people and places and when possible the beauty. A common theme for each venue is how the changes in roads will impact the citizens of the area and that the changes appear to be inevitable. For some the story may be a little bit dry, but I liked it and give The Routes of Man a good read.

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.

I skimmed through it. There was not much that caught my interest. I did learn more than I needed to know about mahogany wood.

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).

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

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

I thoroughly enjoyed it; its well written and written like a George Orwell essay; clear as a window pane, letting the people speak without much authorial input; delightful. Ends up being very informative about China drivers, African truck drivers, Palestinian & Israeli army road issues etc.

I wish I had written this book. By which I mean that I wish I could have traveled these far-flung roads that Ted Connover walked and road on. The book is composed of alternating long and short chapters. The long ones recount his experiences on particular routes in Peru, Northern India, East Africa, Israel/Palestine, China, and Lagos Nigeria. The shorter ones are essays on some facet of roads or transportation, what-have-you. It was a terrific idea and well executed. Heres my beef with the book. Somehow, like Neil MacFarquahars The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday, it somehow remains on the journalism side of things, ie reporting. It doesnt quite manage to crossover into a fundamental statement about the human condition (ie become literature?) as does the writing of Ryszard Kapucinski or Dexter Filkinss The Forever War or Tom Bissells Chasing the Sea, or Bruce Chatwins writing. That may not have been Connovers aim. Connover may not view Kapucinski or Chatwin as an inspiration (both them have had the veracity of their accounts questioned). Still, I liked the book and recommend it. The chapters I most looked forward to were the ones on Peru and Northern India. The ones I found most affecting were those on the middle east and, especially, the last chapter on Lagos. I took the authors implied suggestion to check out the Island of Lagos on Google Earth. Google Earth is a wonderful thing but its crystal clear (well there is some cloud cover) satellite and aerial photos of buildings and traffic dont give a clue about the vibrant and frightening lives of the massed humanity conveyed by Connovers well written account.