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The world's most ambitious design and engineering projects of the past century gained almost instant international notoriety.Each required bold innovation, a unique vision, and many dedicated and courageous teams to make the plans a reality. These landmarks stand today, not only as symbols of their time and place, but also as a testament to the limitless ingenuity of the human spirit. ... Read more

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The building of the Panama Canal was one of the most grandiose, dramatic, and sweeping adventures of all time. Spanning nearly half a century, from its beginnings by a France in pursuit of glory to its completion by the United States on the eve of World War I, it enlisted men, nations, and money on a scale never before seen. Apart from the great wars, it was the largest, costliest single effort ever mounted anywhere on earth, and it affected the lives of tens of thousands of people throughout the world. Here in all its heartbreak and eventual triumph the epic adventure is brought vividly alive by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such books as The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Truman, and John Adams.

Filled with vivid detail and incident, The Path Between the Seas is not only a fact-filled account of an unprecedented engineering feat; it is also the story of the people who were caught up in it -- some to win fame and fortune, others to have their reputations and even their lives destroyed. For many it was the adventure of a lifetime, an adventure whose like will never be seen again. Out of it came a revolution, the birth of a new nation, the conquest of yellow fever, and the expansion of American power.

Told from many viewpoints, this is an account drawn from previously unpublished and undiscovered sources, from interviews with actual participants and their families, from material gathered in Paris, Bogotá, Panama, the Canal Zone, and Washington. It is a canvas filled with memorable people: Ferdinand de Lesseps and his son Charles, trying to repeat de Lesseps's Suez triumph; Jules Verne; Paul Gauguin; Gustave Eiffel; A. T. Mahan and Richard Harding Davis; Senator Mark Hanna; Secretary of State John Hay; the incredible Philippe Bunau-Varilla, "the man who invented Panama"; Dr. William Gorgas; the forgotten American engineer hero John Stevens; Colonel George Washington Goethals; and, above all, Theodore Roosevelt, who "took Panama" in 1903 and left his indelible stamp on the canal.

As informative as it is fascinating, The Path Between the Seas is history told in the grand manner. With novelistic urgency it presents one of the great stories of all time in an account that will remain definitive for many years to come.

With two detailed maps and more than eighty photographs.Amazon.com Review
On December 31, 1999, after nearly a century of rule, theUnited States officially ceded ownership of the Panama Canal to the nation ofPanama. That nation did not exist when, in the mid-19th century,Europeans first began to explore the possibilities of creating a linkbetween the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the narrow butmountainous isthmus; Panama was then a remote and overlooked part ofColombia.

All that changed, writes DavidMcCullough in his magisterial history of the Canal, in 1848, whenprospectors struck gold in California. A wave of fortune seekersdescended on Panama from Europe and the eastern United States, seekingquick passage on California-bound ships in the Pacific, and the PanamaRailroad, built to serve that traffic, was soon the highest-pricedstock listed on the New York Exchange. To build a 51-mile-long shipcanal to replace that railroad seemed an easy matter to someinvestors. But, as McCullough notes, the construction project came toinvolve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations overfour decades; eventually those workers, laboring in oppressive heat ina vast malarial swamp, removed enough soil and rock to build a pyramida mile high. In the early years, they toiled under the direction ofFrench entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who went bankrupt whilepursuing his dream of extending France's empire in the Americas. TheUnited States then entered the picture, with President TheodoreRoosevelt orchestrating the purchase of the canal--but not beforehelping foment a revolution that removed Panama from Colombian ruleand placed it squarely in the American camp.

The story of the Panama Canal is complex, full of heroes, villains,and victims. McCullough's long, richly detailed, and eminentlyliterate book pays homage to an immense undertaking. --GregoryMcNamee ... Read more

Customer Reviews (174)

History and travel classic
This big volume on the history of the Panama Canal is a classic.Very detailed, a long read, yet consistently David McCulloch makes the minutiae interesting.Much historical and social detail about the role of France, and later the US, in the building of the Canal. Anyone visiting Panama for the first time should read this book.

Panama Canal
Arrived promptly.Ordered 2, one to give to traveling partner.

In the process of reading.Glad someone recommended this book.

The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914
Excellent reading for anyone interested on how/why/poltical intrigue and the problems involved with the building of the Panama Canal.

Panama Canal Great Story
The story of the Panama Canal involves history in several countries, financial manipulations, funding and fraud that seem as they occurred yesterday. Characters with extraordinary talents and persona jump off the page. It reads like a great novel but it is history at its best.

Dig We Must For A Better New World
David McCullough is well-known for his exhaustively-researched and eminently readable histories, most of which have won the National Book Award. McCullogh has written about The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, about Theodore's Roosevelt's youthful Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt, about Presidents Truman and John Adams, and about The Johnstown Flood. In THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS he turns his historian's eye toward the grandest construction project ever, the Panama Canal.

Ferdinand DeLesseps is customarily credited with having built the Suez Canal. In actuality, DeLesseps had little to do with the actual engineering of that Canal. He was an impresario, not an engineer; and he was a visionary.

For the 100 years between 1814 and 1914, Europe was largely at peace. Excepting such an atypical war as the Crimean and the American bloodbath of the Civil War, this era, lived predominantly under the shadow of Queen Victoria, was one of peace and technological progress. It was an era in which mankind came to believe (with some justification) that he could remake his world in his image of it. It was an era that took us from the sailing ship to the airplane. It was an era during which the price paid for human advancement seemed reasonable. Man might have developed the ability to span and cleave continents, but his footprint was still small and the rewards huge.

DeLesseps was a man of his era. And if his visions were not entirely original they were daring and they were attainable. A canal connecting the Mediterranean and the Red Sea was the stuff of Pharaoh's plans. It was not until DeLesseps though that a workable canal was built in 1869. Likewise, a canal joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans had been the dream of the Conquistadores, an impossible dream. So when it came time to create such a canal, DeLesseps was the logical choice to lead the project.

DeLesseps was able to imbue everyone around him with his own sense of belief and wonder, but like the rest of the world, DeLesseps underestimated Panama. Suez, for all its complexities and hard work, was an easy precursor, a straight-ahead mostly sea level excavation in a hot, arid but not particularly challenging environment. Panama was different. Though needing a much shorter canal, Panama was a vertical mountainous landscape of trackless steaming jungles, torrential downpours, flooding, landslides, and pestilence. Yet DeLesseps never wavered in his belief that a canal---and a sea level canal, at that---could be built across the isthmus.

Related to Napoleon III, friends with the British Prime Minister, and a mentor of the King of Egypt, DeLesseps handily convinced both governments and ordinary citizens of the practicality of his plan. Such was his hautre that no one seriously challenged his decisions though they were based on incomplete information. Tens of thousands of small investors put their last francs into the private company responsible for building the canal, including DeLesseps himself. It seemed a sound investment. The canal at Suez had, in only a few years, made its own small investors wealthy.

DeLesseps may have been the Pied Piper of Panama. Even in the face of staggering economic losses and endless cost overruns, even in the face of tens of thousands of deaths as tropical diseases ravaged the workmen, people believed in DeLesseps' vision. There's no evidence that he intentionally defrauded or misled anyone, but his own unshakeable faith in the realization of the canal led him to see the project through rose-colored glasses, blinding himself to the fact that the project was failing. His advertising and announcements were full of puffery. When he visited Panama he did so in the dry season, thus avoiding malaria, yellow fever, landslides, and tropical rainstorms. He marveled at the work being done, not recognizing that after years only about ten percent of the canal was dug. When the "French Project" finally imploded, DeLesseps himself avoided censure, but those around him (including his son) were jailed for misappropriation of funds.

Were they guilty? Perhaps only of excessive optimism. The fact (as McCullough amply illustrates) is that the French Project could not have succeeded. The technology to build the canal---such as sufficiently heavy digging equipment and necessary sanitary precautions---simply did not exist or was nascent in the period 1870-1900. Human technology was evolving at a pace faster than any but that of our own time, and even a few months past or future made a significant difference in the "possible."The French suffered as well from a strange myopia, failing to adjust their plans to on-site conditions or changing circumstances. A sea level canal was a practically unrealizable result, but rather than going back to the drawing board, the French engineers persisted in building the canal according to the initial vision provided by DeLesseps.

In the last analysis, of course, DeLesseps was right. A canal could be built, it would be built, and it was built, though the Panama Canal is a far cry from the simple deep ditch contemplated at the outset. It became a lock canal; and it was widened far beyond what DeLesseps imagined. It became more of what a little-known French engineer, Godin de Lepinay envisioned, a series of lakes connected by a channel.

The last French project manager was a DeLesseps-like dreamer, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who continued to promote a canal in Panama despite the fact that the American government (which inherited the French mantle) was in favor of a canal in Nicaragua. Bunau-Varilla hated the idea of a Nicaraguan canal, not least because if the canal was built there he faced a complete loss of his investment in Panama. He became a one-man public relations firm for Panama, courted Congressmen, met with Presidents, hyped the dangers of the Nicaraguan volcanoes, downplayed the dangers of Panamanian earthquakes, of the yellow fever, of malaria, of the physical difficulties he had seen, and promoted Panama as a politically stable place, which it was not as a province of Colombia, but Bunau-Varilla fixed that by staging a bloodless coup in Panama. In a matter of hours, Panama was independent. Scant minutes later, it was recognized by the United States.

While there's no real evidence supporting the supposition that the U.S. staged the Panamanian revolution, it certainly guaranteed its success. President Theodore Roosevelt sent American warships down to Panama to "keep the peace."The American Consul and the American owners of the Panama Railroad quickly bought off the local Colombian authorities who fired a single shot in symbolic defense (that one shot killed a sleeping civilian), and then departed. Bunau-Varilla, moving at a 21st Century pace, negotiated a treaty with the U.S. that allowed the Americans not only to build the canal, but to control it and a twenty mile-wide coast-to-coast swath of Panama into perpetuity. Before even the Panamanians knew what was happening, Roosevelt ordered work on the canal to resume, and "made the dirt fly."

But first Roosevelt how to overcome the natural and man-made difficulties which had bedeviled the French Project. He did this in his customary straight-ahead fashion:

Roosevelt appointed Dr. William Gorgas as head of Panama's Sanitary Department. Gorgas did away with standing water, installed sewage and plumbing systems, cleared the jungle, and cleaned the streets of Panama. In eighteen months he had effectively ended the twin threats of malaria and yellow fever that had caused Panama to be a deathtrap since time immemorial.

Roosevelt appointed Engineer John Stevens to reorganize the work; in fifteen months, Stevens had re-tracked the railroad, upgraded the digging equipment, built numerous new station towns from which an army of workmen could issue, and thoroughly modernized Panama.

Roosevelt appointed Major George Washington Goethals of the Army Corps of Engineers to supervise the digging, which restarted in earnest in 1904. Goethals was indomitable. A man of single-minded determination he cold-welded the project into a virtually seamless whole that operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, rain or shine for seven more years. After a major landslide undid months of work, Goethals shrugged and said, "What the hell...dig it all out again," and they did. McCullough is clearly admiring of Goethals, who was tough but fair and not constitutionally predisposed to accept "No" for an answer to anything.

Very importantly for morale, Roosevelt traveled to the dig, becoming the first U.S. President to leave home during his term. The papers mused that "perhaps this portends that a President may someday visit Europe."

The Canal Zone, unified in purpose, quickly became a utopia, especially for the predominantly white American administrators of the project who numbered in the thousands. Pay was high, prices low, and anything and everything was available at the PX. Medical care was free. Housing was inexpensive or free, and comfortable, with modern conveniences. Board was a fraction of its U.S. price. Entertainment was readily available at the YMCAs and USO clubs, while the K of C, the K of P, the Elks, the Rotary, and the Shriners all had chapters. The Zone sprouted hundreds of homegrown social organizations besides ranging from book clubs to amateur theatrical groups. The death rate was lower than in the U.S., the birth rate higher. In many ways, the American middle class would not have it again as good until the 1950s. Some people, even in the Zone, called it "Socialism," but nobody really objected.

The lot of the tens of thousands of black employees was nowhere as good, though McCullough is quick to point out that they too had free healthcare, and that inexpensive board was available to them. They lived in countryside work camps or in the back streets of Colon and Panama City.The large majority of black workmen were Barbadian, and though their toil was wretched, dangerous, and poorly rewarded, it was more than most of them earned in Barbados at the time. Many died of the terrible accidents that were part and parcel of digging and blasting the canal and dragging the millions of tons of rock and soil away. Others died of the tropical maladies that white "Zonians" no longer had to face. Somewhat cynically, of course, as McCullough reports, the large majority of black workers were not United States citizens and had no advocates. The ones that were Americans were hardly better off. The Zone was a Jim Crow community.

McCullough refers to the nine miles of Culebra (now Galliard) Cut as "the chief point of attack." It was. A supremely difficult stretch that traversed the Continental Divide, the Cut was prone (even after completion) to terrible landslides that undid much of the builders' work.

Unfortunately for THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS McCullough spends so much time on the challenges of the Culebra Cut that he overlooks, or nearly so, the immense tasks involved in damming the Chagres River, rerouting the Panama Railroad, resettling the populations displaced by the waterway, creating Gatun Lake and Lake Madden, and in building the vast hydroelectric plant that powered the locks. And although the locks themselves get good coverage, it is clear that the engineering involved in the building of the locks outstrips even McCullough's considerable storytelling skills. Given the over 400 pages of this impressive book, a chapter or two more would not have detracted from the story.
... Read more

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The tropical forest of Panama's Barro Colorado Island is a luxuriant community of plants and animals, pulsating with life and offering an astonishing view of nature's myriad processes. What does the forest look like? How do the activities of this forest's plants and animals create a community? Now, in A Magic Web, photographer Christian Ziegler and ecologist Egbert Leigh invite readers to enter the marvelous world of Barro Colorado Island. This book provides a unique combination of the spectacular photography of a picture-book and clear, authoritative text written by an active scientist who has spent half a lifetime trying to understand tropical forests. The photographs provide views of the forest and its spectacular diversity of inhabitants, and show many of the activities that give the forest its character and lend structure to its community. Drawing on decades of work on Barro Colorado Island, Egbert Leigh explains how the forest works. The photographs and text reveal the many ways its plants and animals compete with but also depend on each other: the contrasts between solitary cats and intricately organized armies of ants; the different ways plants struggle for a place in the sun, and the ways these plants attract, or domesticate, animals to pollinate their flowers. Finally, the authors show why this, and by implication all other, tropical forests matter to the people who live near them and to the world at large, what we can learn from these forests, and how they differ from temperate-zone forests.Full of gorgeous full-color photographs accompanied by clear and accessible text, A Magic Web is a must for anyone planning to visit a tropical forest, and for all those who only wish they could. ... Read more

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Six Stars would be Better
The pictures are really extrodinaryand the text is very readable and understandable. I don't tire of looking at the photos over and over. ... Read more

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In recent years, sustainable development has emerged as a central goal of the World Bank and grassroots activists alike. In Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America, Lynn R. Horton explores the implications of this new, often contested discourse and related policies for Central America's rural and indigenous poor. Drawing on the testimony of leaders and residents of three communities in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, Horton explores grassroots assumptions, values, and practices of sustainable development and, in particular, the ways in which they overlap with or challenge international financial institutions' discourse of sustainability.

With a comparative, empirical approach, Horton also analyzes dominant practices linked to sustainable development--neoliberal reforms, project interventions, and environmental protection. She reveals how these practices support or undermine economic, cultural, and political opportunities for the rural and indigenous poor and impact these communities' advancement of their own visions of sustainability. Finally, the author explores processes of empowerment that enable communities to articulate and put into practice local visions of sustainability, which contribute toward broader social and structural transformations.

Grassroots Struggles for Sustainability in Central America will interest sociologists, anthropologists, and others who study the theory and practice of sustainable development. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

Beautiful book, not enough images
This is a beautiful book with great information.It is very expensive and I wished it had more images of the wildlife.Unless you need all of the extra morphological and evolutionary info, I would say just buy a field guide instead

Fine addition, but you still need the other two volumes!
This volume provides a synthesis of knowledge and individual species accounts for the more than 650 species of land and marine mammals found in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil. It is the third and final part of a trilogy that now runs to over 1400 pages. The series began with the publication of the first volume in 1989 (The northern Neotropics: Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana), authored by Eisenberg alone. He was then joined by Redford for both the second volume (1992. The southern cone: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay) and now the third. The general aim of this collection is to summarize in a single source what is known about the identity, distribution, history, and ecology of the mammalian fauna of the Neotropics. To this end, every genus and species of mammal known to occur in this biogeographic realm has been given a concise description, together with distributional maps of both known occurrences and estimated ranges. In some cases, figures of mammal parts, such as crania, and sketches and drawings of whole animals have been provided.

Although the third volume features Eisenberg and Redford as the principal authors, it also includes seven stand-alone contributions. Four are from Brazilian mammalogists, on paleontology and biogeography, chiefly of Brazil. Eisenberg himself contributes two extra essays (one on mammalian biodiversity and another on distribution and history of this fauna). Webb contributes a short essay on the history of the mammalian fauna in South America (which renders it somehat redundant with Eisenberg's account). The book starts with a short introduction that inevitably has to repeat some information in earlier volumes, and makes it clear that this volume is to be used in conjunction with the others in the series. This may be a disappointment for some readers, because many mammal species found in the central Neotropics are also found in either the northern or southern regions already covered by the previous two volumes.Therefore, the authors have chosen to give more concise descriptions of"redundant" mammal species, for which finer details have to be located in the other volumes.

The book itself is divided into three parts, with stand-alone contributions concentrated in Parts 1 and 3, and Part 2 being the material written by Eisenberg and Redford together. Here, 13 chapters deal separately with marsupials, edentates, insectivores, bats, primates, terrestrial carnivores, marine carnivores, whales and relatives, sea cows, odd-toed ungulates, even-toad ungulates, rodents, and rabbits. These chapters present not only taxonomic information but also ecological and behavioral characteristics, and distribution maps for most of the species. Indeed, for each species the following topics are generally addressed: Description (morphological), Range and Habitat (or Distribution), and Natural History.In some cases, there are separate sections dealing with Life History, Ecology, and miscellaneous Comments.Several tables of measurements are also found throughout the book and for some species rich groups such as bats and rodents, keys to families and genera are provided.Illustrations of crania, tooth rows, feet, and a few sketches are provided when deemed necessary by the authors, presumably as an aid in field and laboratory identification. A small number of color and black-and-white plates are grouped mid-way through the book. Each chapter and essay comes with its own bibliography, which leads to some redundancy in citations. Overall, the bibliographies are extensive, and the coverage seems exhaustive, with references updated to 1997 (it appears that the book went to press in 1998).

For such an encyclopedic effort, there are remarkably few errors of fact, as far as I can judge. There are, however, some presentation problems. The most common is that of making statements and attributing them to sources that surely did not contribute such statements. Indeed, this lack of precision in citation may be an artifact resulting from Eisenberg and Redford making separate statements without specific references, and then citing a wholesale sequel of authors. Another mistake I noticed is that of citations in the bibliographies that are not found in the text. The opposite also happens, but less frequently. I also found it awkward that among the 19 plates depicting mammals, only one has a scale to gauge their absolute size. Nowhere are we told, either, if mammals grouped in a single plate are proportionally sized.I hope that this omission will be corrected in future editions. Inevitably for a work of this length and complexity, there are typographic errors.Many are found in the literature cited, more commonly in citations made in languages other than English. I did not detect taxonomic errors, but I am not a systematist. Some scientific names are misspelled (e.g., culpeus instead of culpaeus in p. 280; jabcobita instead of jacobita in Map 10.26), and some genera passed to synonymy are sometimes referred to by their old name (e.g. Dusicyon instead of Pseudalopex in p. 283).

All of the above may be considered nit-picking in light of the tremendous contribution toward organizing in a trilogy all that is known on Neotropical mammals. I looked hard for weaknesses in the volume but I could only find strengths. Indeed, this volume is a first-rate capitulation and synthesis of hundreds of papers written in Spanish and Portuguese, thus rendering this wealth of information to the English-speaking readership for the first time. In addition, by treating comprehensively a wide swath of South America along both sides of the Equatorial line, east to west, this book provides a better understanding of the distribution of species that trespass national borders without even noticing them. In this sense, the compilation here reviewed is much more than the summation of separate national books on "The Mammals of X." It gives an overview on the way mammals "perceive" this part of the world and face threats posed by national policies on the exploitation of natural resources. I think this book (together with the two preceding volumes) fully meets its intended aim of gathering and synthesizing disperse information, and delivers even more in the sense of giving a broad-picture of Neotropical mammal biodiversity and biogeography.

The primary readership for this book is supposed to be one of professional mammalogists worldwide. It is also a great resource for graduate students in mammalogy, and, I would add, for conservation biologists and wildlife managersin general. I think this book belongs in the personal libraries of all mammalogists interested in the Neotropics, and also in institutional libraries where students can consult it.

Of limited value if you don't buy the other two volumes ...
I bought this volume first and should have thought of it but I didn't ... since the central neotropics have many of the animals of the northern and the southern areas of the continent, many animals are only covered in shorthand style in this volume, as they've already been described in the other two volumes.

The relatively small number of color-plates was also a bit disappointing. Finally the size of the book (height & breadth) makes it a real challenge to take with you on a field trip. The information on species that *are* described in detail in this volume, however, is excellent. Distribution maps, behavior, detailed measurements, anatomical details and lots of references to source literature make it a joy to read and browse through.

In summary I'd say that, provided you purchase the whole series, it's an excellent reference and clearly deserves 5 stars. As a field guide it's of limited use, because it's so bulky, so that's 3 stars. ... makes 4 stars on average. ... Read more

Product Description
The disappearance of tropical forests is a problem for the world environment. In this book, experts on four rainforest sights in Central and South America - Manaus, Brazil; Manu Park, Peru; Barro Colorado Island, Panama; and La Selva, Costa Rica - compare the characteristics of these systems. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Understanding Amazonian ecology
Text writed by a great botanist and very helpfull in expanding our knowledge about Tropical forest ecology, specially in the Amazon basin. ... Read more

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This volume brings together the results of the Smithsonian Institution's extensive work on the plants and animals of Barro Colorado Island - one of the most intensively studied areas in the tropics. It lays emphasis on the effects of seasonal rhythms of drought and rain on the vegetation and the fauna. Contributions are grouped into sections: physical setting, biotic setting, seasonal rhythms in plants, frugivores, insects of tree crowns and their predators, litter arthropods and their predators, and long-term changes. ... Read more