National Book Award Non Fiction Winner
The Path Between the Seas
by David McCullough
Summary
A panoramic history of the building of the Panama Canal, tracing the doomed French effort under Ferdinand de Lesseps and the ultimate American triumph under Theodore Roosevelt. McCullough renders the engineering, tropical disease, and geopolitical maneuvering with novelistic detail, drawing on diaries, congressional records, and on-site reporting from Panama. The result transforms a feat of construction into a gripping human drama of ambition and loss.
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Historical Context & Significance
McCullough spent years in the jungles of Panama; the book is famous for making the technical engineering of the canal feel like a high-stakes adventure.