By Ted Conover

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist and nationwide e-book Critics Circle Award–winning writer of Newjack, an soaking up ebook approximately roads and their energy to alter the world.

Roads bind our world—metaphorically and literally—transforming landscapes and the lives of the folks who inhabit them. Roads have remarkable energy to affect groups, unite worlds and sunder them, and exhibit the hopes and fears of these who commute them.

With his extraordinary eye for element and his contagious enthusiasm, Ted Conover explores six of those key byways world wide. In Peru, he lines the adventure of a load of infrequent mahogany over the Andes to its starting place, an untracked a part of the Amazon basin quickly to be traversed by way of a brand new east-west path throughout South the USA. In East Africa, he visits truckers whose travels were associated with the global unfold of AIDS. within the West financial institution, he displays street checkpoints with Israeli squaddies after which passes via them with Palestinians, witnessing the injustices and threat borne by way of either side. He shuffles down a frozen riverbed with kids escaping their Himalayan valley to determine how a brand new highway will impact the now-isolated Indian sector of Ladakh. From the passenger seat of a brand new Hyundai piling up the miles, he describes the exuberant upsurge in automobile tradition as highways proliferate throughout China. And from within an ambulance, he deals an apocalyptic yet exact imaginative and prescient of Lagos, Nigeria, the place congestion and chaos on freeways sign the increase of the worldwide megacity.

A lively, pressing publication that finds the prices and merits of being connected—how, from old Rome to the current, roads have performed a vital function in human lifestyles, advancing civilization at the same time they set it again.

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Extra info for The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today

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The telegrapher Page 18 wired the Boulder stationmaster to look for the child as soon as the train pulled into Boulder. The stationmaster found her, but not in the coach. She had climbed onto the cowcatcher and ridden it down the mountain. In the early 1920s, I was deadheading on passenger train 30 from Denver to Cheyenne when one of the senior conductors on the North End, Johnny Mans, sat down beside me for a chat. He told me that his wife had been that little girl. She had hung onto the cowcatcher for her life, he said, too terrified to scream.

He would hover around the boiler, the only source of heat, as much as possible in the winter, but in the summer, there was no escaping the heat from the boiler. The hardships of the fireman's job resulted from the fact that the mechanical engineers who designed locomotives for the manufacturing companies never actually rode in them. They were concerned with designing a powerful, efficient steam power plant, not with making life easier for railroaders. Two hours before the locomotive rolled out of the Denver yards, Sam was on the job, building the fire the hostler had started, checking the coal and water in the tender and the sand in the dome on top of the boiler, and lifting the headlight from its tapered tongue to replenish the oil in the dispenser, even though firemen considered the headlights useless.

Engineers not only had to know how to run the locomotive, they Page 19 had to know how every valve, flue, eccentric, piston, and cylinder worked. If any part broke down en route, the engineer had to fix it and get the locomotive and train safely to the next terminal. Engineers also had to know the company rules covering such things as which trains had right of track and which engines went on the point of a double header. The rules also covered the flag, whistle, bell, lantern, and hand signals that the railroaders used to communicate with one another in the day before radios.

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