Conover, Ted. The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World. New York: Vintage, 2011. Print. The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World is an interesting book about the author, Ted Conover, who travels to various destinations to discover how roads connect people and the effects on the world. On his adventures he meets many people along the way. On each journey, he usually knows someone or has some type of connection to a person who has been to or lives in the current destination. The layout of the book is broken into chapters and mini chapters, which reflect on the main chapter. Each chapter represents a new location and a new road. Conover travels all over the globe to research and experience roads and their effects on people. His first adventure takes place in South America, in Peru. There he travels both by truck and by light water craft. Conover goes through the Andes …show more content…
Roads connect us all by products, education, disease, war, progress, and population. The main point, that Conover is trying to explain to the reader, is that roads are not always a positive and often, roads are not to be thought of as American style roads. They are usually either unsafe, such as in China or highly militarized, such as in West Bank. To get this point across, Conover uses examples. He writes about the travels of mahogany to the spread of AIDs to exemplify how we are all connected, for better or for worse, by roads. To show how roads can be unsafe he uses facts including that China’s leading cause of death for men up to 45 is road accidents. He also goes through military checkpoints himself, in West Bank, to experience them first hand. A passage that explains Conover’s concern for road travel in China is found on page