Theses of "The Routes of Man" by Ted Conover (English 110, Section 10)

People most always enjoy hearing stories, true or not, but arguably the best stories are the ones that are true. Throughout the first four sections of Routes of Man by Ted Conover, readers can see that the author has led an interesting and inspired life by way of his travels and experiences on the various roads and paths other people of different cultures than his own take regularly as a way of life. Whether it was his journey to discover how mahogany logged in Peru made its way into Park Avenue apartments as furnishing or the harrowing adventure on the frozen river path known as chaddar located in the Himalayan Mountains, Conover thoroughly regales his readers with the retelling of his experiences through the narrations of his adventures, his descriptions of the harsh environments that were visited as well as of the people accustomed to living in such places, and his comparing and contrasting of the differences between the cultures that he finds on his excursions and of his own culture. On his expeditions, Conover points out the cultural differences between his own culture and those of the people he is visiting and how roads affect their daily lives. Conover implies that some roads can be dangerous to those who walk the roads; other roads are not the danger when taking them but are nonetheless dangerous because those who take the roads are the danger. To the author, roads have positive and negative prospects to them; in the case of the chaddar in the Himalayas, the local residents believe that a paved road would be good for them because it would expose them to the outside world, a reason that some Western thinkers (Conover references Helena Norberg-Hodge) believe would be not to build a paved road for the locals because it would destroy their cultural heritage. Since Conover remains to be consistent throughout the first half of Routes of Man, one can assume that Conover will continue to utilize the rhetorical devices of narration, description, and compare/contrast as readers retrace Conover’s routes on the world’s roads.