"The Path Between the Seas"

[fiefoe]

David McCullough marshals a cast of thousands to tell the story of the building of the Panama Canal. The start is deeply exciting, but also comes with enough foreshadowing to make the reader worry about the eventual body count.

• (Expeditions to survey possible canal site): Nothing even remotely so systematic, so elaborate or sensible, had ever been attempted before.
• (Starving in the jungle:) His men devoured anything they could lay hands on, including live toads and a variety of palm nut that burned the enamel from their teeth.
• Within the preceding nine months alone two of the most celebrated events of the century had occurred: the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad and the opening of the Suez Canal.
• It was said that the power generated by one steamship during a single Atlantic crossing would be sufficient to raise from the Nile and set in place every stone of the Great Pyramid.
• (On casualties of Panama railroad): a rather ghoulish but thriving trade developed in the shipping of cadavers, pickled in large barrels, to medical schools and hospitals all over the world.
• (The completion of Suez Canal:) This was jubilation of a kind not known before and that future generations would have some trouble comprehending... Africa had been made an island at a stroke.
• Victoria, who was to give a name to the era, its elegance, its sense of purpose, its heavy, varnished furniture, its small and large hypocrisies, was very much in her prime... Lives of the Engineers, wherein good and useful giants - Brindley of the English canals, Rennie of the Waterloo Bridge, the genius Telford ....
• A Cairo opera house had been built for the occasion (of the Suez Canal opening) and Verdi had been commissioned to write a spectacular new work, Aida.
• President of the Paris Geographical society... wrote of "this ardor for geography" as one of the characteristics of the epoch.