Year in Review Books, "Path Between the Seas," David McCullough

David McCullough is a veritable font of great writing. His works on the early fathers of the United States of American, as well as later Presidents are amongst the best I have read. When I picked up this book, I had previously read a number of his others, and was anticipating a repeat of those.

The story of the Panama canal has two major chapters, that of the French attempt and the successful American venture. "The Path Between the Seas" tells both of those stories exhaustively.

It is a book that reads more like a technical manual rather than a well written history. I realize that the engineering details are paramount to the story, but to the casual reader such as I am, hundreds of pages of that data becomes quite tiresome. The history of it (the larger than life characters, the political climate, etc) gets bogged down in the unscrutible details of how this and that "cut" was made in the mountain that divides Panama in two.

It is, to me, the ONLY aberration in the numerous books McCullough has written, and it may well be that it is the only way to write the history of the Panama Canal correctly. If so, I have no need to read another version of that again.