The Routes of Man. How Roads Are Changing The World

Conover, Ted

ISBN 10: 1400042445 / ISBN 13: 9781400042449

Published by Alfred A Knopf, New York, 2010

About this Item

Large octavo size [16x24cm approx]. Near Fine condition in a Near Fine Dustjacket. Dustjacket now protected in our purpose-made clear archival plastic sleeve. An excellent copy. Illustrated with Black & White Photographs and Maps. Robust, professional packaging and tracking provided for all parcels. 333 pages. In exploring how roads have the power to change the world, the author looks at six key byways worldwide - Peru, East Africa, West Bank, India, China, Nigeria.

Seller Inventory # 330582

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Routes of Man. How Roads Are Changing The World
• Publisher: Alfred A Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400042445
• ISBN 13: 9781400042449
• Binding: Hardback
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Road Transport

About this title

Synopsis

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.