The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914

Several years ago, I was lucky enough to visit the Panama Canal (pictures below), and was struck then by the remarkable feat that it was. And I didn't even know the half of it. The Path Between the Seas has filled every gap in my knowledge and more. At some 600 pages, it is a veritable tome, and David McCullough has clearly done an almost-unfathomable amount of research - on the Suez Canal, the history of Panama, early engineering and railroading technologies and techniques and American imperialism (add Panama to the list of places Teddy Roosevelt took by storm), to name a few of the areas he visits in great, but highly readable detail. (I enjoyed this book more, and found it more readable than The Greater Journey, which I read last year.)

McCullough does a fine job tracing the canal from its beginnings as a French canal in the 1870s through its completion by the United States in 1914. In the process, some 25,000 men lost their lives and some $639 million - in 1914 dollars - were expended. Yet even the statistics - the cost, the amount of earth moved, the number of men employed (and killed), the gallons of water that pour through the locks - fail to convey the magnitude of the project that Ferdinand de Lesseps and John Stevens and George Goethals undertook and that Goethals saw through to completion.