McCullough deserves 5 stars for the incredible depth and breadth of information presented here. At times, the book warranted no more than 3 stars, for the detail can get tiresome. Hence my 4 stars.

I learned so much about the building of the Panama Canal, and McCullough doesn’t restrict his book to the engineering feats, which are stupendous. He also explores the Panamanian culture, the rampant diseases, the diverse work force and accompanying social divisions, and so much more. The more I read, the more I wondered how the canal was ever finished.

I wanted to learn more about the initial years of transit fees. Who kept them? Ironically, McCullough’s book was published in 1977, the year Pres. Carter gave away the Canal, and oh how I wish McCullough had returned to include an afterword about why that happened, how the treaty was passed, and why the U. S. has never been compensated for the colossal expense of lives and money in the building of this truly remarkable Canal.

Absolutely fascinating even to a non-engineering sort of person.

While I am never overly impressed by feats of engineering, I found myself marveling at the complexity, the sheer magnitude, and nearly flawless execution of the Panama “project”. And, even 110 years later, it remains a wonder of the modern world and a testament to American ingenuity (as well as the forward thinking of our French partners who began what we were able to finish).

According to McCullough, who makes all 600+ pages oh-so-readable, workers on the canal felt they “were building large and building to last”. They felt like “pioneers who were rolling back the wilderness”(558).

The application of modern medical science, hygiene and strict sanitation efforts, led by Gorgas made malaria, yellow fever, the plague and even the insects carrying disease nearly obsolete in this tropical jungle. Gorgas’ efforts, which were constantly minimized and fought, saved thousands of lives and were successfully utilized against other communicable diseases and outbreaks.

The availability of electricity and new forms of financing were also key to the success of the project. unlike, early years, there was no hint of corruption (and, none has ever been found) during the years that completed the canal under Goethals.

we are traveling to the canal in March. I am so glad I read this book in preparation.

Probably the definitive book on the Panama Canal. The amount of in formation is mind boggling.

Recommend

I love David McCullough! This book was purchased used and the spine broke halfway through the read. No matter. Inspired by the builders of the canal, I kept plowing through the book, while holding the pages together tenuously. The 600+ page length was disheartening to me as times, as the frequent landslides were to those working on the Culebra cut. Regardless, I set my gaze on the prize to be won, reading a McCullough book cover to cover (instead of via audiobook). And just as the Americans and West Indians pressed on to the goal only to see its completion met with minimal fanfare, so I finished this book satisfied but now wondering what comes next.

In all seriousness, it was a really good read. It took a subject in which I had little interest and drew me in. The engineering aspects were too detailed for my taste at times, but other details were exciting, especially those concerning the leading characters of the saga, French and American.

I gave this book 3 stars because I liked it, and I'm glad that I read it. Really it would be a 3.8 star rating if the Goodreads rating system allowed for decimals. This book is especially of interest to those in engineering or with a taste for history in the early 20th as well as late 19th century.

Finally, the biggest surprise for me from the from the book was how the building of the canal was book-ended by the Franco-Prussian war and WW1. The former inspired the building of the canal by the French, while the latter's initiation spoiled the glory of the canal's completion.

A well researched and interestingly presented account of the Panama Canal, that is considered even today as one of the greatest human engineering achievements.
I found it interesting and learned many surprising (to me) facts:

Ferdinand de Lesseps (the builder of the Suez Canal) and Gustave Eiffel (the builder of the tower) were involved in the first efforts of this canal. The company, led by de Lesseps went bankrupt in 1889 after investing 260 million dollars and excavating more than 70 million cubic yards of earth.

Over 25000 people died during the work of the canal, most during the early French attempts due to Malaria and Yellow fever.

The Americans originally planned to dig the canal in Nicaragua. The decision to dig it in its current place was due to Nicaragua’s dangerous volcanoes and the fact that the French had already started the digging in Panama.

Panama was part of Colombia during the first years of the work on the canal. The US intent to influence the area, especially the Panama Canal's construction and control, led to the (US backed) separation of Panama from Colombia in 1903 and its establishment as a nation.




This is not the first book of this author and as in all others I enjoyed the read.

Rtc…

I read this out loud to Dan. I really didn't think we'd finish before we left for Panama, but we did it! And this book is loooong. I really enjoyed it though. This is the first McCullough book I've read and I'm incredibly impressed with the amount of research he puts into his writing and loved all the details. It made seeing the Canal so much more impressive. I only wish McCullough would have gone into a little more depth with the actual engineering of the canal, but the politics behind the project and all the problems and solutions were fascinating.

4 ☆

The creation of the Panama Canal was far more than a vast, unprecedented feat of engineering. It was a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war. Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever before mounted anywhere on earth.

A monumental, herculean project of unimaginable scale. If one doesn't see it in person, one needs to compare the before and after photos / maps of area to get an idea of its scope. In the "before" mode, maps show the Chagres River meandering through tropical forests and the mountainous terrain of the Isthmus of Panama. In "after," there's an enormous body of water, Gatun Lake, spreading over what looks like roughly 40 percent of the same area.

I saw part of the Panama Canal on a cruise last year. I transited only through the Agua Clara locks on the Atlantic side. One clue of the full magnitude of this century-plus old engineering project completed came from the sight of the massive control tower beside the locks. Apparently, only one human is required to operate the locks at the flick of a tiny joystick-like equivalent.

n  

n    Because of it, one nation, France, was rocked to its foundations. Another, Colombia, lost its most prized possession, the Isthmus of Panama. Nicaragua, on the verge of becoming a world crossroads, was left to wait for some future chance. n  

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Frenchman Ferdinand De Lesseps had brimmed with overconfidence after completing the Suez Canal in 1869. De Lesseps was the charismatic catalyst as the French were the first to tackle creating a Canal to join the world's two largest oceans. But as with many massive engineering projects, lack of money and mastery of technical issues derailed the project. In De Lesseps' case, he had blundered with his preference to build a single level channel (like the Suez Canal) when ultimately a tiered locks system was necessary. There was one other underestimated threat -- the severity of tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria. From 1881 to 1903, the French had excavated 78 million cubic yards, which seems immense but was only about a quarter of the job. And they had kept better records of their progress than on the death toll expended by their workforce.

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n    The Republic of Panama was born. The United State was embarked on a role of global involvement.

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat."
-- Theodore Roosevelt n  

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The Americans became involved once the French failed their last ditch effort to raise sufficient capital. The Americans altered the engineering focus of the project; a tiered locks system was necessary given the different tidal conditions that characterized the two oceans. From 1904 through 1914, the Americans had excavated 232 million cubic yards, or three times the amount accomplished by the French in two decades. This is not stated to minimize the French level of activity because they had contributed a great deal by choosing the original path and setting up the framework of the project.

Together, the French and American expenditures in nominal dollars totaled about $639 million over four decades. To derive a more refined estimate of the equivalent value in today's money, I would need to use an inflation calculator for each year's outlay since the project's inception; but this book didn't provide that data. But a back of the envelope guesstimate would ballpark it around $22 billion (which still seems too low). What is more helpful given the time lapse is to know that no country at that time had ever spent that kind of money before.

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n    In truth, the color line, of which almost nothing was said in print, cut through every facet of daily life in the Zone, and it was as clearly drawn and as closely observed as anywhere in the Deep South or the most rigid colonial enclaves in Africa. n  

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One way that management's racist beliefs manifested was the lack of records about the total loss of life. Management and technical experts were Caucasian. The laborers who faced the greatest physical threat were not. The companies had brought in unskilled workers from many different countries across the globe. The largest contingent of laborers consisted of black and brown people from Caribbean islands like Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada, Martinique, and Trinidad. Current estimates peg the total death toll at 25,000 persons.

In The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, David McCullough gave a comprehensive history that focused on the decision makers and players involved in the drama associated with any monumental undertaking. It wasn't a dry account but it certainly was long. The hardcover edition concluded before attaining the 700-pages mark. A reader needs to be motivated to complete this, but one will gain a fuller appreciation of just what had been accomplished. And for readers who don't want to invest the time, the audiobook offers an abridged version of this book that clocked in under 9 hours.

I finished reading this book today, at my sister's house in Eastern Kentucky. It is a very through book, covering everything about the planning and execution of the building of the Panama Canal.

After several surveys, a railroad was constructed across the Isthmus in 1850 (which at that time was a province of Columbia). The French, under the guidance of Ferdinand de Lesseps (who had been behind the building of the Suez Canal) began construction of a Canal in 1881, but ceased in 1889 under a cloud of corruption. Another French company took over in 1894 to maintain the equipment. In the United States, the favored route was through Nicaragua.
The French agreed to sell their holdings to the United States, but Columbia refused to sign a Canal treaty. With American backing, Panama declared independence in 1903. The actual building of the Canal took ten years, from 1904 to 1914.

Among interesting topics in the book include the role of President Theodore Roosevelt, the eradication of yellow fever, and the stark disparity between the housing and treatment of the minority white workers in the Canal Zone and the majority Black workers.

The Book was published in 1977, the same year that the treaty was signed to turn the Canal over to Panama, which occurred in 1999. I very much enjoyed this book, and recommend it to all lovers of history.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I'm a huge fan of McCullough, and I'm a little worried that my mixed feelings come from not being in a proper mental state to read something this heavy, and also I listened to most of this with a really horrible narrator.

Ok, whats good about it. This may sound ridiculous, but I never gave it much thought. This was a huge undertaking and an engineering marvel. I always thought it was all Roosevelt's impetus to develop this project, but it's interesting that it was actually a French entrepreneur who got the ball started. I also never thought about the issues that they'd have in Panama. Yellow Fever and Malaria ran rampant, and the efforts to control the mosquito population were fascinating.

This is also a very long and drawn out book. It tops out at just short of 700 pages, and it could have been cut down by at least 100 pages. What McCullough does well is characterization. He re-creates the personality of these people that lives a century ago and makes them realistic. My biggest issue I have with this one is that he takes this a little too far. There are sections of the book that drag on while he elucidates their character traits, which is useful, but semi-superfluous.

Great story. Worth the read. This review may have to be revisited after a bit more runimation.

Probably my favorite book of the year so far! It’s long but held my interest throughout the whole book and touched on so many interesting topics. I had no idea the canal was started by the French, that Americans initially wanted to build the canal in Nicaragua, or how Panama gained its independence, just to name a few things!

My whole life is a lie! My favorite palindrome is BOGUS. I mean, sure, it's still a palindrome, but it's just not true!

A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL, PANAMA!

A M A N A P L A N A C A N A L P A N A M A

There wasn't "a" man, there wasn't even "a" plan. There were like, a dozen men, all with various plans! It was almost built in Nicaragua! The one guy with a decent plan from the beginning was ignored and his plan sat unnoticed in a file somewhere, while the rest of them ran around, killing thousands of workers and then shrugging and going back to the drawing board when that didn't work.

The French started it, failed terribly, lost thousands of men (and women) to malaria and yellow fever, and then went bankrupt. Teddy Roosevelt, in classic Teddy Roosevelt style, went after it but couldn't decide (and frankly didn't care) where to build or how, he just wanted a canal built, and some of the glory (if not all).

The whole situation was, frankly, a clustercuss and it's amazing it got built at all. It's quite fascinating reading, and I had no idea about any of it.

But it's also rather dry reading, and in the middle section McCullough assumes you know all about Latin American politics of the time. I don't know about Latin American politics of TODAY, let alone 1905. There's an endless parade of names, and literally everyone is described as being broad-shouldered and with a mustache, and it was impossible for me to keep track of them. There is a revolution for Panamanian independence (which I did not know they didn't have) and I could not keep track of who was on which side. The US totally meddled (of course) and I wasn't sure if they were on one side, or both, and which side would be better.

It was, to be blunt, a hard slog, reading wise. The last 200 pages though, with actual canal building and descriptions of the living quarters and amenities at the work camps, were more my jam.