The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
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- ISBN13: 9781400042449
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award–winning leader of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world.
Roads bind our world—metaphorically and factually—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 persons 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 strut 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 very ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.
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I am passing this along for your listening pleasure:
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She is generally positive and does mention specifically the male dominated scenery of transportation.
She reviews the variety of international aspects of human mobility which the leader discusses at part.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Since it’s really hard (or impossible) to read maps on a Kindle, the Kindle edition for a book like this is just too expensive.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Roads connect our settlements and expand empires. They can also bring misery, though few people have agreed them much thought, until now. //The Routes of Man// will inspire you to respect roads. Conover has traveled extensively and his first road starts in the Manhattan apartment of a wealthy couple decorating with Mahogany, an increasingly rare wood. Conover traces shipping roads used to bring Mahogany to market. We go for a truck ride with Conover from Cuzco, over the Andes Mountains, to the Amazon basin. We then go up river–another form of road–with woodcutters effective in restricted areas of the black market world of Mahogany logging.
Next, we travel a frozen river in the Himalayas that doubles as a road for a remote village sending their teenagers to boarding school in the city. We ride with truckers in Africa for a glimpse of how AIDs is spread through the population. The most nerve wracking road was in the West Bank of Israel where Conover rode and walked with Palestinians navigating Israeli checkpoints. He also rode with Israeli soldiers patrolling treacherous territory. In conclusion, he questions us to consider how we will treat people we meet on the road. Brilliant reading!
Reviewed by Grady Jones
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
As a highway engineer, specializing in traffic operations, my incentive for reading this book was to see roads from a different perspective. I selected the book up at a public signing by the leader and had the chance to hear him speak about his experiences. I find it appealing 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 loved for decades, while ignoring the socio-economic consequences. You want to travel with Mr. Conover and look his companions in the eye and question if they really know what they are getting themselves into. Overall, a excellent read.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
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 open a different view on a theme 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 tales give a much more intimate, personal feel to persons tales, 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.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5