Overview

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.

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9781508278504

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Reviews

Award-winning Yale historian Rutkow reconstructs the efforts to build it while considering the long-term consequences for North, Central, and South America. -- Library Journal

An even-handed and comprehensive history that could not be more relevant. -- Business Week on American Canopy

Author Information

Jacques Roy is a audio narrator and actor, known for The Lower Angels and Room and Board. Eric Rutkow is a writer, lawyer, and professor of history at Yale University. He is the author of The Longest Line on the Map and American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation, which was named one of the top ten books of 2012 by Smithsonian magazine and received the Association of American Publisher's PROSE award for US history. Rutkow earned his BA and PhD from Yale and his JD from Harvard.

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