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

From the brilliant award-winning author of American Canopy, 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?

Now historian Eric Rutkow 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.