Home Feed
Home
Search
Search
Add Review, Blurb, Quote
Add
Activity
Activity
Profile
Profile
Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas
Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas | Eric Rutkow
From the award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the world's longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century's worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highway's history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American Highway--the United States' other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure project--has become an orphan of the past, effectively erased from the story of the "American Century." The Longest Line on the Map uncovers this incredible tale for the first time and weaves it into a tapestry that fascinates, informs, and delights. Rutkow's narrative forces the reader to take seriously the question: Why couldn't the Americas have become a single region that "is" and not two near irreconcilable halves that "are"? Whether you're fascinated by the history of the Americas, or you've dreamed of driving around the globe, or you simply love world records and the stories behind them, The Longest Line on the Map is a riveting narrative, a lost epic of hemispheric scale.
Amazon Indiebound Barnes and Noble WorldCat Goodreads LibraryThing
review
Hooked_on_books
post image
Mehso-so

While there‘s some interesting info here, the whole thing‘s a bit of a slog. It starts by talking about efforts to create a railroad connecting Alaska the Tierra del Fuego, heads into the rise of motor vehicles in the US, then continues into efforts to connect the Americas tip to tip with a highway. In need of editing and a much more engaging voice.

#Panama #ReadingAmericas2023

Librarybelle I see the book is over 400 pages! Way to stick with this one 12mo
Hooked_on_books @Librarybelle I never would have made it through in print! I listened to the audio while working outside and frankly tuned out a bit at times. That‘s the only way this happened. 12mo
Librarybelle 😂 Good strategy! 12mo
49 likes3 comments