Books

American history texts often introduce the Panama Canal with a brief statement that the project was commenced by the French, then taken over by the United States, who finished it. The implication is that the French were unequal to the task, but Yankee ingenuity and determination completed the job in short order.

As Matthew Parker points out in this compendious study, there was considerably more to the story. He notes that the completion of a waterway across the Americas, a dream of explorers from Columbus on, was the most stupendous engineering challenge of modern times, rivaled only by the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and unmatched until the landing of human beings on the moon. The project took more than 30 years, claimed more than 25,000 lives and nearly brought down the French government.

Unlike in many previous studies, Mr. Parker turns his focus first to the French struggle to create a sea-level water bridge across the 40-mile isthmus for more than 20 years before they were defeated by disease, a collapse of finances and a hostile geography that sometimes seemed to resist human intrusion with a conscious defiance.

In 1904, the American government, led by the vigorous Theodore Roosevelt with his "Big Stick" diplomacy stepped into the breach. The U.S. advantages included a rich national treasury, improvements in machinery, a superior understanding of railroad engineering and a realization that only a carefully designed system of locks and dams would meet the geographic challenge.

The Americans also benefited from advances in medical science that tamed killer diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, and they brought in military might to control regional political instability and advance American imperialism into Latin America.

Mr. Parker pulls no punches. He hints at the political corruption of TR's administration and details the brutal, barbaric racism that victimized tens of thousands of black workers from Jamaica and the Barbados. The story is rife with drama and political intrigue.

Nevertheless, the book is not an easy read. It's hard to pinpoint, precisely, why such a volume, filled as it is with meticulous, well-researched detail, becomes something of a slog to get through. Mr. Parker's style is workmanlike and accessible; he offers understandable details of science and engineering and punctuates his points with contemporary personalized testimony. Still, the book somehow fails to capture and hold the reader's attention for extended periods and seems to lose intensity as it progresses.

In a way, this is much like the anticlimactic completion of the canal itself. The first ship's passage through the locks between two oceans in August 1914 was overshadowed by other events, such as the outbreak of World War I, and only made Page 14 of The New York Times.

Mr. Parker's attempt to revive the details of this "astonishing, almost arrogant" display of human ambition does succeed in its particulars. The journey is worthwhile, but it will not be easily accomplished.

Clay Reynolds is professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His most recent book is Sandhill County Lines.

The Epic Story of One

of the Greatest Human

Achievements of All

Time – the Building of

the Panama Canal

Matthew Parker

(Doubleday, $30)

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