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Berkeley Arts & Letters is a project bringing writers and thinkers together with readers for inspiration, provocation, education, and sharing conversations. Produced by Melissa Mytinger and Praveen Madan, we welcome everyone who's interested in civil discourse, curiosity...and the pleasure of words.

TED (Newjack) CONOVER / The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and They Way We Live Today

Start: March 18, 2010 - 7:30pm

Roads: metaphorically and literally, they bind our modern world into a coherent whole. From the transportation of goods, knowledge, and disease to their hold on the imagination, the role of roads in our lives cannot be overstated. They even permeate our language: you navigate the information superhighway; your career is in the fast lane; you choose the high (or low) road; you take the path less traveled.

Behind every road lies a story, and in THE ROUTES OF MAN, Ted Conover brings his unparalleled eye to six roads around the world that have a profound impact on the lives lived on or near them, the businesses run over them, and the cultures that surround them. Conover’s dispatches come from Peru: accompanying a trucker through the perilous Andes, where he contemplates the threat that better infrastructure poses to indigenous populations and surrounding rainforests; the Indian region of Ladakh, where he follows locals down the Chaddar, a frozen river at the bottom of a canyon and the only path in existence during winter, and considers what the coming highway will do to Buddhist towns now untouched by the wider world; East Africa, where he revisits a trucking route from Tanzania through Rwanda and Burundi along which one could trace the spread of AIDS in Africa to see what has changed over a decade; the West Bank, as he passes through security checkpoints with both Palestinians and Israelis, seeing firsthand how grueling and unfair the process is for both sides;China, where he paints an exuberant and frightening portrait of the emerging car culture from Chinese roads and the rapid increases in auto sales and highway construction; Lagos, Nigeria, describing a megacity where traffic stalls for hours, teenage beggars run between stopped cars, and ambulances park along the highway to wait for accidents.

Conover’s journeys ultimately reveal the costs and benefits of being connected -- how roads have played a crucial role in human life, from ancient Rome to the present, changing man and his world for better and for worse.

“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

“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

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. Read a travel community’s interview with Conover.