num_pages: 448
description: From the award-winning author of American Canopy  a dazzling account of the worlds 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 centurys 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 highways 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 Highwaythe United States other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure projecthas 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. Rutkows narrative forces the reader to take seriously the Why couldnt the Americas have become a single region that is and not two near irreconcilable halves that are? Whether youre fascinated by the history of the Americas or youve 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.
language: English
title: The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas
publisher: Scribner