The Routes of Man

Zusatztext 51431249 Informationen zum Autor 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. Klappentext 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. Leseprobe THE ROAD IS VERY UNFAIR IN 1992, I TRAVELED TO Kenya because of something I'd read in the newspaper. A report on an international AIDS conference in Amsterdam briefly mentioned research suggesting that long- distance truck drivers might be spreading the disease, by sleeping with prostitutes along the routes they plied between central Africa and the continent's east coast, on the Indian Ocean. At the time, most Americans knew AIDS as a disease of gay men, junkies, and Haitians. Randy Shilts's important and influential And the Band Played On (1987) focused on the role of a promiscuous flight attendant, Gaetan Dugas, in spreading the disease to several countries, suggesting that Dugas was the Patient Zero of AIDS among gay men. But AIDS was a developing story, and five years later, when I read the article on the conference, it was generally thought that the epidemic had originated among people unknown, possibly in central Africa, and that presumably it spread first not by air but by road. My college roommate of two years, Doug Dittman, who was gay, had died of AIDS a year before I read the article. His partner, Mark, my other roommate, had become infected as well; and between Doug's death and Mark's illness, I found myself thinking about AIDS a lot. Other people seemed to be trying hard not to think about it (President Ronald Reagan resisted mentioning the epidemic for years), and that was something I wished I could change.When I read about the African truckers, a lightbulb went on: because of our own trucker culture, I thought...

 “Ted Conover is one of the great writers of my generation, and this may be his finest book. Fearless and compassionate, with echoes of Conrad and Kerouac, it explores how the road, once a symbol of limitless possibility, has become a path to annihilation. I have enormous admiration for what Conover has achieved.”
            -Eric Schlosser, author, Fast Food Nation
 
 “Ted Conover's exploration of six far-flung ‘roads,’ from a truck route over the Andes to an ambulance crew's rounds in Lagos, Nigeria, will prove a delight, while at the same time serving to remind that in many places of the world the act of getting around is an art marked by pride, lust, corruption and bloodshed.”
            -Erik Larson, author, The Devil in the White City
 
“Ted Conover’s courageous reporting and vivid prose lend The Routes of Man an un-put-down-able momentum.”
            -Anne Fadiman, author, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
 
“Like a lot of people, I've spent a good deal of my life on roads, thinking about roads, and believing I knew a little bit about roads. Ted Conover's The Routes of Man pretty much demolished this belief. With its surfeit of fascinating information and beautifully and empathetically drawn characters, this book does what all great books do: It forces you to look at what is notionally familiar with new and better eyes.”
            -Tom Bissell, author, The Father of All Things
 
“Humans evolved on the road and we go on seeking territory, survival, wealth, and even knowledge. The Odyssey, Don Quixote, On the Road, The Road, Arabian Sands, Marco Polo on the Silk Road, wagon trains heading for California, and Latinos at the fence between Mexico and the U.S.A.—so many of us streaming toward vivid dreams. Buy this book and enjoy some armchair roaming (the second best way to travel). That’s my advice.”
            -William Kittredge, author, Hole in the Sky
 
“The roads traveled in The Routes of Man have this common destination—a story we wouldn’t have imagined ourselves but have been waiting to hear, told with extraordinary intelligence and empathy.”
            -Mark Singer, author, Somewhere in America
 
“With Conover’s keen observations and thoughtful meditations, I’d follow him just about anywhere—and this journey is as provocative and as discerning as it gets.”
            -Alex Kotlowitz, author, There Are No Children Here
 
“A work of tremendous research and imagination, The Routes of Man is a brilliant and poetic approach to human history and a meditation on civilization’s future.”
            -Melissa Fay Greene, author, Praying for Sheetrock
 
“As I read this book, I grew increasingly impressed not only with Conover’s bravery and hardihood, which he underplays, but, more important, with that quality one associates with Steinbeck: heart. Here is a man who cares about people everywhere, not merely that convenient abstraction, humanity, but people in particular . . . The six road situations he describes are undeniable quandaries, and we owe it to the people caught up in them, not to mention to our planet, to consider what policies, if any, should engineer the roads through everyone’s lives.”
            -William T. Vollmann, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Gripping and provocative . . . Thi…