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Title: Excellent telling of an excellent story
Review: I had no idea that a book on the building of the Panama Canal could be so fascinating, mostly because I had no idea that the story itself was so fascinating. David McCullough's 1977 telling of that story, in The Path Between the Seas, is excellent. From the debate over the path and the method, to the somewhat disastrous French attempt, through the triumph of the United States' completion of the canal, this 600 page history moves fast. The technological (sea level or locks?), natural (the landslides and the annual flooding of the Chagres River), and health (malaria and yellow fever) obstacles were enormous. The scale of the project was, literally, unprecedented. This book is just as much biography (de Lesseps, Bunau-Varilla, Roosevelt, Gorgas, Goethels) and political history as it is a description of just how the canal was built.
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