The Longest Line on the Map

The United States, the Pan-American Highway, and the Quest to Link the Americas

By: Eric Rutkow

Narrated by: Jacques Roy

From the award-winning author of American Canopy, a dazzling account of the world’s longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century’s worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save the mythic Darien Gap that straddles Panama and Colombia. The highway’s history, however, has long remained a mystery, a story scattered among government archives, private papers, and fading memories. In contrast to the Panama Canal and its vast literature, the Pan-American Highway—the United States’ other great twentieth-century hemispheric infrastructure project—has become an orphan of the past, effectively erased from the story of the “American Century.”

The Longest Line on the Map uncovers this incredible tale for the first time and weaves it into a tapestry that fascinates, informs, and delights. Rutkow’s narrative forces the reader to take seriously the question: Why couldn’t the Americas have become a single region that “is” and not two near irreconcilable halves that “are”? Whether you’re fascinated by the history of the Americas, or you’ve dreamed of driving around the globe, or you simply love world records and the stories behind them, The Longest Line on the Map is a riveting narrative, a lost epic of hemispheric scale.

Buy this.

I’ve loved “American Canopy” for years and stumbled upon this second endeavor by Eric Rutkow. I had super high expectations and this didn’t disappoint. If you enjoy history and the tapestry of storytelling across subject and time, you will love this. Brilliant and incredibly well researched work.

Comes Up Short of What Might Have Been

From the title and based upon the Audible description, I expected this book to cover the history of the entire Pan American Highway, from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Or, I at least thought that the important portions of the road would be covered. Not so. First, half of the book concerns attempts at creating a rail line through Mexico and Central America in the 19th Century. Of course, that never occurred. It is an interesting political history, but does not concern what we now consider the Pan American Highway.

The highway portion of the book covers little of the highway itself beyond the Central American portion. Again, there is some interesting history here, but it leaves out the old AlCan Highway, the interstate system through the US, the Mexican highways, and any highways at all in South America. All that is included is what I would call the "shortest line on the map."

Furthermore, there is very little of the story of how the highway was built. Mostly it concerns the surveying expeditions in preparation for the highway construction.

So, what is left is a tale about the politics of the highway through Central America.

I even had to look up the Pan American Highway on Wikipedia to see what roads constitute the "longest line."

Needless to say, I was surprised and disappointed when the book ended with no discussion of other portions of the Pan American Highway. I was really looking forward to learning about the segments through the South American countries. If either the title of the book has been honest or the description on Audible had mentioned what the book was really about, I would not have purchased it.

Lovely book, but why hire a narrator who can't pronounce Spanish?

Generally all very excellent, but a book on a Latino topic with substantial Spanish language words should have a narrator who can pronounce them.