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 worlds 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 highways 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 Rutkows 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 highways 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 birds eye view of the incredible highway that snakes through more than a centurys worth of US and Latin American history, ending in a triumphant ideology that insists the Americas share a common destiny and mutual interests.