Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation

Leo Koretz was a shyster of the first order. In a Chicago rife with corruption ("Only in 1920s Chicago could a public official prosecute criminals at his day job and in his spare time prepare the dead ones to face their final judgment."), Koretz was schooling them all. Mr Koretz, it seems, had found oil deep in the Panamanian jungle, oil he was selling to Standard Oil for a killing, and all of Chicago's hoi polloi wanted in on the easy money. Uh-huh.

Bernie Madoff would be proud.

Empire of Deception is part biography, part Chicago history, (Big Bill Thompson is there, of course, and Leopold and Loeb, and the 1919 race riots), and part early twentieth century guide to Panama and its canal. The book does begin a little slow, but it picks up once Koretz starts swindling - and more so once he's on the lam.

This is not a great, soaring biography in the style of Catherine the Great. It is more a history lesson of the ways in which man takes advantage of other men. Ultimately, Empire of Deception is a story as old as time: insatiable human greed. Koretz's greed, certainly, but also the greed of his (mostly wealthy) investors looking to make a little more money just a little faster, and also that of his prosecutors, though they were arguably more interested in power than in wealth.

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.