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How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today
Knopf
February 2010
On Sale: February 9, 2010
312 pages
ISBN: 1400042445
EAN: 9781400042449
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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