The Longest Line on the Map: The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas/Eric Rutkow

Description The brilliant, award-winning author of American Canopy presents a dazzling account of the epic quest to link North and South America with the world's longest road--the Pan American Highway--and how its construction and evolution reflected the divergent fates of North, Central, and South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Pan-American Highway is the longest road in the world, running the length of the Western Hemisphere from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in South America. It represents a dream of friendship, commerce, mobility, of the Americas united. Our collective imaginations have been forged along its path: Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the iconic Argentine revolutionary, traveled it northward in The Motorcycle Diaries ; Jack Kerouac, the voice of the beat generation, followed it southward in On the Road . Many adventurers have journeyed the highway's distance, but the road itself still remains shrouded in mystery. Why was it built? And why does it remain unfinished, with a sixty-mile long break, the famed Darien Gap, enduring between Panama and Colombia? In Eric Rutkow's "richly detailed examination of efforts to build a highway from Alaska to the tip of Argentina... this] fresh, well-documented account" ( Kirkus Reviews ) chronicles the full story of the highway's long, winding path to construction, which reshaped foreign policy, cost US taxpayers a billion dollars, consumed countless lives over a 150-year period, and changed the destinies of two continents. Fully illustrated with photographs, documents, and maps, The Longest Line on the Map offers readers a bird's eye view of the incredible highway that snakes through more than a century's worth of US and Latin American history, ending in a triumphant ideology that insists the Americas share a common destiny and mutual interests.