A Stretch of Water That Changed The World By Susan Rella | Pff the Shelf -Thursday, August 07, 2014 Happy 100th birthday, Panama Canal! You totally should not exist. Think I’m exaggerating? Take a look at David McCullough’s masterful account of this financial catastrophe/marvel of engineering (really, I think it was both), The Path Between the Seas. These seven hundred pages span four decades, several countries, and more larger-than-life personalities than should ever be allowed in one book.
McCullough details the building of the canal with a keen eye to the world surrounding it, setting the scene not only in Panama, but in the context of so many important historical events: the technological achievements and advancements that bred the Suez Canal and the Eiffel Tower; the mysterious, debilitating diseases of malaria and yellow fever; and the fights for independence of several Central American countries.
In McCullough’s deft hands, we learn that it’s impossible to separate the Panama Canal from its chronology. The Path Between the Seas shows that, truly, nothing is ever created in a vacuum. This riveting story subtly delineates the dawn of a new age of globalism: France began the canal, the United States finished it, and Panama now controls it. It was a canal that truly bridged a century—a ridiculously apt endeavor to usher in the 1900s, where science and technology would reign supreme. -
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