I have been interested in the Panama Canal since learning of it as a child. While in the Army, I was sent to the U.S. Canal Zone for 2 weeks of Jungle Operations Training before going to Vietnam and got to see the canal first-hand. The author, David McCullough, is one of my favorite historical writers. So, reading this book was a no-brainer. I was not disappointed.
The book is extensively researched and is detailed, to a fault, with all the information you would ever need to know about this monumental venture that lasted nearly 44 years.
From the first French effort that failed due to the overwhelming magnitude of the job required, disease and financial scandal. To the dramatic U.S. takeover of the construction from France and the ensuing political power plays. To the astonishing engineering feats and tremendous medical accomplishments overcoming yellow fever and malaria. This award-winning book tells of all the successes and failures of the thousands of men and women who took part in this epic enterprise.
The text of the book can be overwhelming at times. An abridged audio version is available and is nicely read by actor, Edward Herrmann.

A fluent and seemingly authoritative account of everything that went into the building of the Panama Canal.

I’d thought that this subject would make a great epic mini series and reading about the engineering, the personalities, the societies black and white has not dissuaded me.

“Ideas too have their period of extrinsic incubation, and particularly if they run contrary to what has always seemed common sense.”

Fact is almost always more interesting than fiction, and history is full of a lot of interesting facts. David McCullough has proved this time and time again in his books. “The Path Between the Seas” is one of his best examples. The history of the building of the Panama Canal is one I knew nothing about and it is one hugely fascinating story. The 44 year span between the beginnings of the project to the canal’s opening is a great human drama, and it is true to boot!
The text is divided into 3 sections. Part One focuses on the French idea for the canal and their attempt at creating it. I knew nothing about this aspect of the Panama Canal. It is a grand story, with larger than life figures, ambitious schemes, and shadowy villains. It’s got it all, and it is edge of your seat reading. Part Two focuses on America’s taking over the project years after the French failed attempt. Part Three focuses on the completion of the project and some of the key players of that aspect.
There were many highlights for me in this text, but one moment was McCullough’s detailing of the Panamanian Locks on the canal. It had this reader in 2019 shaking his head in amazement at what engineers accomplished in 1911! As McCullough aptly writes, “They were truly one of the engineering triumphs of all time, but for reasons most people failed to comprehend.”
Someone in the time period wrote of the enterprise, “Strongly as the Panama Canal appeals to the imagination as the carrying out of an ideal, it is above all things a practical, mechanical and industrial achievement.” After reading this book you see just how much it is all of those things, and more!
Over 40 years after the project began, in an irony that only real life can produce, WW I officially starts on the same day as the first oceangoing vessel passes thru the canal.
“The Path Between the Seas” is one of McCullough’s better efforts. And he has not written a bad book. This is a tome worthy of such a monumental subject. I end this review encouraging you to read this book, and with a line from the text that sums it up. “Primarily the canal is an expression of that old and noble desire to bridge the divide, to bring people together. It is a work of civilization.”

This is a wonderful book. I read this book ahead of a cruise my wife and I took through the Panama Canal and was stunned at the massive under taking to accomplish this structure. This is a part of history I knew nothing about. How France went bankrupt trying to finish it, the huge numbers of people who died from yellow fever and the theories at the time of why. Fascinating.
At one point the author gives a list of what one surveying expedition took on the trip. For me the list is fascinating all on its own. For one; the hundreds and hundreds of extra shoes. Which seemed odd until you find out later the expedition ran out of shoes just a few miles in. The jungle ate them. If you like well-written history I highly recommend it.
David Putnam author of The Bruno Johnson series.

This was a good read (yes, the pun was intended) and a lot more depressing than I anticipated. Literally everyone died of yellow fever. Okay, maybe not everyone. Some people died of malaria too. McCullough does a fantastic job bringing this era to life, the descriptions of the working conditions and monumental efforts undertaken to complete this project, originally by France and then the United States, were illuminating. The laborers and engineers quite literally endured Hell to build this canal. The disease and heat must have been unbearable. To struggle with that burden while completing nothing less than an engineering marvel is astonishing.

I enjoyed learning about the French involvement in this project. Prior to reading this book, I did not realize just how extensive their role was in the construction of the canal, but now I have a newfound appreciation for them.

Also, Ferdinand de Lesseps is awesome. He was THE canal guy. Cool.

Read all the other reviews. I read this decades ago but reread it and I’m so glad I did. I had forgotten the trials involved over decades in realizing some dreams. This humanizes the entire process of those who succeeded and those who failed. It’s a magnificent story.

As David McCulloch divined before writing this book, the creation of the Panama Canal is an awe-inspiring story. The idea of a transisthmian canal had occupied the minds of men for centuries. Yet it then took almost 25,000 lives, over six hundred million dollars, and the efforts of two great nations, France and the United States, spanning half a century, to bring it too completion. It is arguably the largest engineering project in human history, and deserves a large chronicle.

As McCulloch emphasizes, the story begins in France. Former diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from the completion, against all odds, and against all trained engineering advice, of the Suez Canal in 1870, dreamed of another victory. He championed the Panama Canal as the next great embodiment of modern progress, and thus organized a transisthmian canal conference in Paris in 1879, which came to de Lesseps’s preordained conclusion that Panama was the place and now was the time for such a job. With a minimal inspection of the site, he organized a private stock company, and sent men and machines to do the job. Malaria and especially Yellow Fever ravished the men, and dampness and heat destroyed the machines. Almost 20,000 deaths, the vast majority during the project, took place during this French regime. When de Lesseps and his son Charles, running of money, went to the French people with a Parliamentary approved lottery bond of 500 million Francs in 1888, investors refused to pony up more. The company was put into ignominious bankruptcy, ruining millions who had trusted the great family. A year later, the scurrilous antiseptic journalist Edouard Drumont broke the news that much of the previous money had gone to bribes to legislators and public newspapers to drum up positive reports of the canal. Eventually, Charles and Gustav Eiffel were sentenced to jail, as de Lesseps descended into senility. It seemed the canal dream had died forever.

The work of William Nelson Cromwell, New York Republican lobbyist and lawyer, and founder of the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, and French promoter Phillippe Bunau-Varillia, who convinced the Americans to pick up the project. Despite Alabama Senator John Henry Morgan’s stumping for a Nicaragua canal, Cromwell and Bunau-Varillia pointed out how much work the French had done, and helped make a deal with the Colombian government to sell the rights to the Americans. When Columbia asked for more cash, however, President Theodore Roosevelt gave American warships the order to protect Panamanian revolutionaries as they revolted, and then made the Hays-Bunau-Varilla treaty with the new government. Roosevelt took personal supervision of the canal, visiting it once and even operating a Buckarye crane, and appointed most of its officials, including Major George Goethals and especially William Gorgas, the accomplished army physician who eradicated yellow fever and malaria on the island by destroying the mosquito population and cleaning stagnant water. By the time of canal’s completion in 1914, the death rate would be lower for Americans in the Canal Zone than back home, itself a stupendous achievement.
Surprisingly for a popular history, McCulloch often dawdles too long on secondary issues, or returns again and again to the same subjects with little new material (slides in the excavation, fumigating houses, travels on the Panama railroad), but on the whole it is an amazing look at a truly world-defining project, one whose dividends are still paying for all of us in increased trade and travel today.

So, here’s the question. Do you ever really like an author, read a couple of his books and really, really like the way he writes? You find a book that he’s written that you haven’t read yet, it’s a winner of the National Book Award, and you know it’s guaranteed to be a great book, wonderful book? You hear from friends and critics that it is absolutely wonderful. You put it on your wish list, and your wife finally buys it for you as a Christmas gift. She even writes a loving phrase inside the cover, knowing how much you are looking forward to the book.

And then you actually read it. And….well…something is missing.

Don’t get me wrong. I absolutely LOVED 1776, McCullough’s book about the beginnings of the United States, and his book about the Johnstown Flood was fabulous. My two favorite categories of books are science fiction and historical. But this? This was…meh.

The Path Between the Seas is about the creation of the Panama Canal, which the book proposes was the greatest engineering feat the world has ever seen, perhaps greater than getting us on the moon. But the book spent half the book on the political aspects of France’s raising money for it, and whenever a new person was introduced, McCullough went into incredible detail about that person’s origins and background. I found myself dragging through the book. It wasn’t until I got to the last part of the book, when the United States got involved that it picked up somewhat. Even so, it wasn’t much beyond watching paint dry.

I hate to say it. Especially when so many critics think this book is absolutely wonderful. But I was BORED. I will give the author credit for thoroughness, but that very aspect is probably what made the story–all 698 pages of it–pretty intolerable for me.

What a remarkable piece of research! I started reading this prior to a trip through the Panama Canal in December but didn’t realize how long it was so didn’t finish until now. Fascinating history that I never realized. Like how much the French did before failing to build the canal in the 1880s. That Panama was actually part of Columbia and revolted (with our encouragement) before the American efforts started. How the canal was almost built in Nicaragua instead. If you aren’t seriously interested, you may find some of this long book to be boring, but it was way more intriguing to me than I expected!

Lengthy, but McCullough's historical writing reads like an adventure story, and he really sets the stage with historical events surrounding this engineering feat. Yellow fever, malaria, political skulduggery, heroes and villains all play an active role in this story.

At its heart, this novel is a simply fascinating tale of political scheming, morally dubious backroom dealing, and ultimately the strength and perseverance of man, all in service of waging war against nature itself—or progress, as TR would say. What makes it even more compelling is that it’s all true. I don’t really know much about this event, and this book opened my eyes to just how extraordinary a feat it really was. Although it was made possible through the incredible technological advances of the time, no one should think the task would be any easier today. As I read further, the exploits of Ferdinand de Lesseps (an extraordinary figure in his own right whose fame has been all but lost to history), Teddy Roosevelt, and the many other men who almost seem to have been conjured up as characters to add to the drama (Cromwell, Bunau-Varilla, Stevens, Morgan, to name a few), each paled in comparison to the momentous task of conquering the Canal itself, which almost became a character in its own right. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed McCullough’s expansive retelling of the truly thrilling story and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work. “I believe we are but children picking up pebbles on the shore of the boundless ocean…”

Because of the Panama Canal, France was rocked to its foundation; Columbia lost its most prized possession (the Isthmus); Nicaragua (which was the first location considered) on the verge of becoming a world crossroads was left to wait for some future chance; the Republic of Panama was born; and the United States embarked on a role of global involvement.

Ferdinand de Lesseps proved that a canal could connect major seas/oceans and open them to commercial travel and wealth. As the "father of the Suez", he was a world-wide hero when the Suez Canal was completed and he turned his eyes to Central America to join the Atlantic and the Pacific. The first half of the book is dedicated to the French attempt which was a total failure. De Lesseps seemed to ignore that Suez was flat as a table top, covered in sand, had no mountains, and was hot but not humid. Panama was the total opposite and and stopped man at every turn. Additionally, Yellow fever and malaria which were rampant in Panama killed thousands of workers in an era when the causes of these diseases were unknown. Millions of francs were wasted/embezzled and De Lesseps company went bankrupt and scandal rocked France.

President Teddy Roosevelt, as one might expect, was all in favor of the US taking over the building of the canal and pushed through legislation to develop a department to “lead the charge” and recognize Panama as an independent republic. They also bought all machinery and buildings which were deserted when the French left, and most of which was practically worthless. The politics of the situation were complicated and moved very slowly, as did the book at this point. The first boat to pass through the finished canal was a lowly cement boat, on August 15, 1915.

This book almost has too much detail which lowered my rating to four stars but even with the excess detail, this is still a fascinating story of one of the greatest single man-made efforts in history and changed the world’s commerce forever. Recommended.