The Routes of Man

January 4, 2010


Reviewed by
Jeb Brugmann
In The Routes of Man
, Conover, author of the NBCC award–winning Newjack
, reveals globalization's neural system growing along the world's expanding and connecting road systems. Governments and smugglers, armies and insurgents, and the local poor and international NGOs negotiate their ambitions at border crossings, checkpoints, and dives. Tracing the route of rare mahogany from Peru's illegal jungle logging camps to Manhattan's brownstones, he examines how highways connect the fates of forests, untouched tribes, and finicky antique collectors. In the Himalayan frontier of Kashmir, highways are ventures of national territorial control, and in China a growing superhighway system underscores the disparity between the haves and have-nots.
Conover's voice is that of a sobered Kerouac, tamed by a bigger conscience, and on an open road increasingly controlled by corporate, government, and military interests. His acclaimed narrative gifts are on full display in a wonderfully evenhanded treatment of the roadway in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Highways have been co-opted for Israeli settlements, and Palestinian professors, engineers, and migrant laborers construct ever-shifting back-road routes and taxi-hops to earn their living. With Conover as our guide, we move through Israeli checkpoints in Palestine's West Bank and witness the daily indignities faced by corralled Palestinian commuters and the psychological angst of Israeli soldiers. There is no open road here, just a gritty, fractured infrastructure of hatred that strangles both nations.
More subtly, Conover reveals the highway as common social territory, particularly as the meeting place between men and women. His treatment of east African truck drivers—whose travels are suspected to be linked with the global spread of AIDS—avoids stereotype and sensationalism. He is as attentive to and interested by the drudgery of transporting goods as with the truckers' polygamy or encounters with sex workers and police bribery. We meet truck drivers who are true gentlemen and tough, articulate women fully capable of negotiating roadside life. Conover maintains a commitment to accurate portrayal and embraces the whole world, not only its dramatic aspects.
The Routes of Man
seeks to describe more than to explain this ever-connecting world. It does the former with an agility that leaves the reader anticipating the next adventure. But the narrative fails to build the argument posed in its subtitle: that roads themselves have become a source of change in the world, independent of the nations, armies, and cities that build, control, and fill them with trade and traffic. But this many-textured journey is not to be missed. Conover deftly navigates the romance and harsh reality of a world intent on a real and not just a virtual connectedness.
Jeb Brugmann is author of
Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities Are Changing the World.

December 15, 2009
From National Book Critics Circle Award winner Conover (Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, 2000, etc.), a long view of global trade, empire building, cultural collapse, disease vectors and all the other things that come with the installation of a road.

Even as the country fills with ever-wider highways—by some estimates, an area the size of Ohio is now given over to road asphalt—and the level of climate-changing particulates rises, other countries are rushing to add to their inventory of highways, especially aspiring China (which is"on course to equal us in cars" by about 2025) and India."We've reached the point where it seems nowadays as though we're paving the world," writes the author, and"it is hard to build without destroying" Conover hops behind the windshield to have a look, traveling vertiginous roller-coaster routes in the Andes that would make a condor flinch, but that also act to bind distant communities and bring much-needed goods to far-flung corners of what used to be the Inca Empire—communities served, in many cases, by roads the Incas built more than half a millennium ago, and that are doing better than their macadam descendants. Such roads bring desired goods out of the remote vastness as well—Conover traces the course of a load of mahogany from rainforest to Park Avenue. Elsewhere the author gazes through road-weary eyes at the adaptations people in the Himalayas have made to an absence of good roads—glacial ones will do, until the glaciers melt—and at the role of trucks and truckers in spreading AIDS throughout Africa. He even braves road journeys through China, where the traffic mortality rate is among the highest in the world.

A readable, fact-filled, well-written exploration of how roads work, for good and ill, and what their future likely holds.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

January 15, 2010
The title is both a sexist throwback and inaccurate. This is "The Routes of Ted Conover." If you choose to go along with his travels, usually on roads, you'll learn that roads "not only connect but intersect" and that college gives you a more formal education than a road trip will. We learn that a rich Park Avenue couple will be buying lots of mahogany for their apartment flooring upgrade, a set-up apparently needed for Conover to go on a 50-page expedition into the Amazon jungle with Peruvians seeking mahogany trees to cut into planks. They use roads in their endeavors. Further random travels enable the author to give us disconnected simplistic lessons about AIDS in Africa (spread by truckers who use roads), military history (wars require roads), ecology (lots of animals get killed on roads), Israel and Palestine (it's very tense on those roads). The unifying theme is Conover and his travels to cover topics he's not an expert on. How'd he get so lucky? [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/1/09.]Margaret Heilbrun (MH), "Library Journal"

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2010
Roads bring medicine and disease, development and destruction, commerce and war. Curious about the impact of new roads on isolated places, immersion journalist Conover, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, rides in unreliable, body-battering trucks on harrowing roads in Peru to witness the illegal logging of mahogany trees, then, with all due irony, stays at a hotel for eco-tourists. In the spellbound Himalayan valley of Zanskar, he joins villagers walking down the only winter road: the frozen river. What will happen if India builds an all-season road? Is there a connection between truckers and the spread of AIDS in Africa? It seems so as Conover rides with a Kenyan truck driver who observes, The road is very unfair, very harsh. Road-to-hell stories of Iraq and Afghanistan are matched by chilling experiences at the checkpoints that block roads and destroy lives in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Convivial, intrepid, and happiest in motion, Conover tempers concerns about the paradoxes of roads with appreciation for the ingenuity and fortitude of the road warriors who welcome him into their arduous lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)