There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But Stevens was able to recruit the greatest engineering minds of the period-and the book is able to recapture their breakthroughs.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.

Meanwhile, viewing the French example, Congress so feared possible graft in Panama that it threw horrific red tape around the canal project. A further twist was the origin of the Panamanian republic which permitted the canal to go through: French adventurer Phillippe Bunau-Varilla executed a coup against Colombia in 1903 for 'the greater glory of France,' then, according to McCullough, promptly put the new nation and its treasury under the wardship of the US State Department and the House of Morgan respectively. Ironically, it was the often jingoistic 'Manifest Destiny' rhetoric and the medical experience of the brutal Spanish-American War that provided Congressional backing and scientific leads for the Panama task. William Gorges, who conquered malaria and yellow fever in a region where hospital rooms used to literally shake from patients' chills.

In an open, vigorous style, the author of The Johnstown Flood (1968) and The Brooklyn Bridge (1972) contrasts the manic-depressive attitudes of French and American populations and leaders toward the canal with the cool perseverance of his two heroes: the engineer John Stevens, a former common laborer who took charge of the collapsing canal project and realized that the problem was not digging but transportation and Dr. A first-rate drama of-mobilization and diplomacy 'not unlike that of war.' When fifteen years of struggle by Suez veteran Ferdinand de Lesseps to build a canal through the Panamanian isthmus collapsed through tropical disease, logistical barriers, and financial disgrace, two Americans managed literally superlative accomplishments: moving billions of cubic yards of dirt, harnessing one of the world's most savage rivers, developing an unprecedented lock and electrical system-and, not least, defeating the Anopheles mosquito.

A path between the seas