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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 Awardβwinning author of Newjack, an absorbing book about roads and their power to change the world. Roads bind our worldβmetaphorically and literallyβtransforming 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 connectedβhow, from ancient Rome to the present, roads have played a crucial role in human life, advancing civilization even as they set it back.
 Media BuzzMarketplace - PRI - March 25, 2010
Fresh Air - NPR - February 15, 2010
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