Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America's Mexican Migrants (41 page)

THE ROUTES OF MAN

Travels in the Paved World

Roads unite people and sunder them. They bind cultures and highlight our differences. With his unrivaled passion and his famous eye for detail, Ted Conover explores six of these key byways worldwide: in Peru, East Africa, China, Nigeria, the Himalayas, and the West Bank. In this incredible journey, Conover introduces his reader to intriguing characters and addresses some of the world's most pressing issues-from the spread of AIDS by truckers in East Africa to smuggling along Peruvian highways.

NEWJACK

Guarding Sing Sing

When Ted Conover’s request to shadow a recruit at New York State Corrections Academy was denied, he decided to apply for a job as a prison officer himself. The result is an unprecedented work of eyewitness journalism about his year-long passage into Sing Sing prison as a rookie guard, or “newjack.” Through his insights into the harsh culture of prison, the grueling and demeaning working conditions, and the way the job encroaches on his family life, he reveals how the prison system brutalizes everyone connected with it.

WHITEOUT

Lost in Aspen

Irreverent, poignant, and revealing,
Whiteout
is a meditation on wealth and the vainglorious quest for paradise in Aspen, Colorado. Even as Ted Conover describes how he crashed Don Johnson’s Christmas party, or what it was like to sit in on the taping of John Denver’s holiday video, he is turning the lens of his craft upon himself and documenting his own seduction by the Aspen mystique. The result is journalism with the laser moral focus of enduring satire.

ROLLING NOWHERE

Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes

In
Rolling Nowhere,
Conover travels the rails: equipped with rummage store clothing, a bedroll, and his notebooks, he immerses himself in the peculiar culture of the hobo, where handshakes and introductions are foreign, but where everyone knows where the Sally (Salvation Army) and the Willy (Goodwill) are. He encounters both unexpected charity and indignities, but above all, he gets to know the men and women who, for some reason or another, live this life.