The Longest Line on the Map, Eric Rutkow
The Longest Line on the Map, Eric Rutkow
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The Longest Line on the Map
The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas

Author: Eric Rutkow

Narrator: Jacques Roy

Unabridged: 14 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/08/2019


Synopsis

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.

About Eric Rutkow

Eric Rutkow is an assistant professor of history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and the author of The Longest Line on the Map. His first book, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (2012), received the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award for US history and was named one of the top books of the year by Smithsonian magazine. He earned his BA and PhD from Yale and his JD from Harvard.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Casey

This book was a major disappointment. The subtitle "The United States, the Pan-American Highway and the Quest to Link the Americas" while addressed in the book, left a great deal to be desired. The first half of the book rambles on about early attempts to link the span with a railroad and only gets......more

Goodreads review by Craig

I thoroughly enjoy books on history that read more like a novel than a dry textbook. this is one of those. Rutkow covers such a wide range of geography and social politics that it is impossible for the normal reader to verify the details he presents. When he covered the importance of theodore Roosev......more