Customer Reviews

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

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We love roads, and we come to hate them. "Anyone," writes Conover in his opening paragraph, "who has benefited from a better road--a shorter route, a smoother and safer drive--can testify to the importance of good roads. But when humans strive, we also err, and it is hard to build without destroying."

That contradiction, that tension underlies the book. A road from Peru's Altiplano into the jungle allows access to valuable mahogany trees, but also threatens primitive people and an established ecology. In East Africa, a road that is a clear economic boon to many has also helped the spread of AIDS, via truckers and prostitutes along its length. Roads are integral to development, and development can look disastrous.

There is nothing armchair about Conover's reporting. He clearly has a library and has read widely, but each of the six chapters is written from inside a culture, whether the author is zipping along the new highways of China or riding inside an ambulance through the teeming, chaotic city of Lagos, Nigeria. It's a book full of people, and the conflicts are inevitable. Why, a friend asks the author, would he go to Lagos, a city which Conover admits has "few museums, not too many antiquities, only a handful of public spaces or buildings of note, and stunningly little natural beauty. It does, however, have a reputation for crime, and lots of lots of people." Because people are interesting, Conover says, and "So is crime."

So are the politics of Israel and Palestine--and the chapter on the roads of the West Bank is the best piece of journalism I've ever read about that conflict. Conover explores the Israeli checkpoints in the company of both Palestinians and the Israeli soldiers who try to control them. It's degrading to both sides. The soldiers are looking for guns, explosives and suicide bombers, and most Palestinians are simply trying to get to work, or get home. Israel's management of the West Bank often comes down to restricting the travel of the Palestinians, and when Conover is in line with them as they move on foot toward a pair of turnstiles, "an exercise in gradual compression," the reader gets a visceral feel for their frustration and humiliation.

The soldiers don't like it either. "Innocent civilians...are inevitably damaged by the army's work in the territories," Conover writes. He spends weeks with an Israeli commander and his men, who not only run the checkpoints but sometimes tear up Palestinian houses in search of arms. It's bad for the families, the commander says, "But what's not plain until the fifteenth time is that it's bad for you."

Six fascinating travels interspersed with engaging personal essays: a great book.

Ted Conover is the ideal travel companion. He seems equally comfortable standing in a swanky apartment in the Upper East Side, and tramping through the rain forest of Peru. In this book he takes us to places we'd otherwise never see: One day we're riding a mahogany raft down the Mother of God River in Peru, another day we're being herded through a dusty check-point in Ramallah. We get to know people we'd never otherwise meet: an African truck driver, teenagers from a remote Himalayan village, and an ambulance crew in Lagos, Nigeria. Roads connect these people. So does Conover's unerring eye for detail, and his pitch-perfect ear for language. This book is more than just an adventure: it's an invitation to understand each other and to know the world in which we live.

I downloaded this to my Kindle after reading a positive review in The New Yorker.
Each of the pieces in this book have a different feel, all presented a different view on a subject I had read about many times before - the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the spread of AIDS and corruption in Africa, the emerging middle-class in China, the interminable violence on the West Bank and so on, but these stories give a much more intimate, personal feel to those stories, an opportunity to feel it up close - to give you a sense of personal experience.
The piece on the West Bank is one of the best pieces of reporting I have read in years.

Highly recommended.

Quick warning ... This is not the wide-ranging study you'd think it would be from the title. Instead, it's really just a series of vignettes set on the road somewhere throughout the world - a driving club in China, a truck route in East Africa, hiking a frozen river in Tibet, following the trail of mahogany from the jungles of Peru, riding along with an ambulance through the traffic jam that is Lagos, Israeli blockades in Palestine ...

Now, these vignettes are mostly great. Conover is quite a gifted writer. He really gives you a feel for the places and people involved, and he does so without his own personality ever really intruding. (Some were better than others, though, with the Peru and Lagos ones seeming a little meandering.)

That this book is presented as anything more than a random collection of tales, though, is a joke. Conover makes an effort, but it's simply not there.

I found his little intermezzos between stories especially annoying in this regard. Instead of relating another story, they're mostly random musings and gatherings on some vague topic. One, called "Double-Edged Swords," manages to discuss Napoleon, Baron Haussmann, the Trail of Tears, Bataan, J.M Coetzee, Dino Buzzati, Afghanistan, Eisenhower, Mad Max, and Cormac McCarthy all in the space of 5 pages.

His métier is really just retelling his very interesting experiences. Along these lines, I highly recommed Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, and Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Illegal Migrants. I guess I could recommend The Routes of Man, but I'd definitely recommend these others first.

I picked up this book after reading a review in, I think, the Economist. This is a wonderful book and well written. Roads are the unifying theme and Conover retells the varied ancounters which he had travelling far flung places. What makes this book outstanding is not only the writing and the experience but that Conover manages to be humble and to appreciate all the people whom he meets. Even though he travels far and wide, he never comes over as the self centered adventurer. he retains a quiet, held back tone, describing trips with car clubs in China, travels with illegal loggers in Peru or the experience of Palestinians in their homeland with compassion, interest and without passing judgement. Roads, like Megacities, are destined to be the future of humankind and he captures this very well. He also captures the attraction of the road excellently.
The only misgiving which I have is that this is basically a collection of excellently written travelogues and description, but he fails at really coming up with an overarching theme or narrative. It never becomes clear why he actaully chose those places and how he really puts them into a larger context.

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. Here's my beef with the book. Somehow, like Neil MacFarquahar's The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday, it somehow remains on the journalism side of things, ie reporting. It doesn't quite manage to crossover into a fundamental statement about the human condition (ie become literature?) as does the writing of Ryszard Kapucinski or Dexter Filkins's The Forever War or Tom Bissell's Chasing the Sea, or Bruce Chatwin's writing. That may not have been Connover's 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 author's 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 don't give a clue about the vibrant and frightening lives of the massed humanity conveyed by Connover's well written account.

Ted Conover must be an amazing dinner companion. He's 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 I've 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 it's also illuminated and deepened by secondary research and, thanks to the author's willingness to acknowledge his own biases and speculations, one of the most balanced pieces of non-fiction writing I've read in a long time.

(BTW, I agree w/the critics at Bookmarks Magazine--the subtitle's 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 weren't met. But actually, that turned out to be a good thing. It was _better_ than I expected it to be!)

Picked this up for a recent plane flight to Africa, thinking it would give me plenty to read on the way over. Unfortunately, I screwed up - as I read the entire book on one flight, and was stuck with nothing but cheesy movies and in flight magazines for the second flight. Bad for me, but good for my review of the book. I loved it.

Conover follows several "roads" throughout the world, and highlights the impact that these roads are having on the people. He typically withholds judgment and just tells the story, but at times it is clear that he is both thrilled by and challenged by the prospect of these roads. They open up new markets, allow people to buy and sell goods, and generally integrate people better into the capitalist, western culture. However, this is usually at some expense of their native culture - whether it is people in northern India, who for centuries have had to use a frozen river to access lands outside their own, or the burgeoning car culture of China - both are challenging what it means to traditionally live in those areas.

Overall, I was engaged and excited at many points. I found myself looking at roads in my area of Africa and imagining the impact they've had, as well as the roads back home. This book not only was an enjoyable read, it told a story that bears further thought and introspection.

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 you're 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, we're 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 Conover's 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).

As a highway engineer, specializing in traffic operations, my incentive for reading this book was to see roads from a different perspective. I picked the book up at a public signing by the author and had the chance to hear him speak about his experiences. I find it interesting to read about cultures that are decades behind the states when it comes to sprawl and mobility; that are envious of the glorified benefits of the mobility that we have enjoyed for decades, while ignoring the socio-economic consequences. You want to travel with Mr. Conover and look his companions in the eye and ask if they really know what they are getting themselves into. Overall, a good read.