The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 Author: David McCullough | Language: English | ISBN:
B002FK3U4Q | Format: EPUB
The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 Description
The National Book Award–winning epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal, a first-rate drama of the bold and brilliant engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph, told by master historian David McCullough.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal. In The Path Between the Seas, acclaimed historian David McCullough delivers a first-rate drama of the sweeping human undertaking that led to the creation of this grand enterprise.
The Path Between the Seas tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures. Applying his remarkable gift for writing lucid, lively exposition, McCullough weaves the many strands of the momentous event into a comprehensive and captivating tale.
Winner of the National Book Award for history, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, and the Cornelius Ryan Award (for the best book of the year on international affairs),
The Path Between the Seas is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of technology, international intrigue, and human drama.
- File Size: 71650 KB
- Print Length: 698 pages
- Publisher: Touchstone (October 27, 2001)
- Sold by: Simon and Schuster Digital Sales Inc
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002FK3U4Q
- Text-to-Speech: Not enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,228 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #1
in Books > History > Americas > Central America > Panama - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > Central America - #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Engineering
- #1
in Books > History > Americas > Central America > Panama - #1
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > Central America - #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Engineering
David McCollough is a heck of a writer -- a fact I already knew from reading his wonderful biography Truman. His skill does justice to an epic story of recent times: the building of the Panama Canal.
This big book is necessary to tell a big tale. The effort to build the Path Between the Seas across the isthmus of Panama lasted from the 1870's through 1914. In a nutshell, first the French tried and failed to build a sea level crossing at Panama. This was in pursuit of a vision held by many national leaders in order to cut thousands of miles from the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The Americans picked up where the French left off, and after a decade succeeded in creating a crossing using locks and a man-made lake.
What McCollough does so well is flesh out the above nutshell. It is a tale that would not be believed if written as fiction. The level of incompetence, misfeasance and malfeasance, wondrously peculiar personalities, engineering failures and brilliance, vision and size astound the reader and underscore how that age relied more upon enthusiasm, idealism and optimism in the pursuit of grand efforts than does our careful and measured era. The French followed the builder of the Suez Canal into the jungles of Panama. Tens of thousands of French families invested their life savings in the stock of a company that had no plans for the actual canal, very little good data of conditions on the isthmus, no idea of the amount of earth required to be removed, and no budget that would pay for the grand adventure.
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