Perspective

David McCullough is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, educated there and at Yale, whose boyhood interest in Theodore Roosevelt leads him into exploring great figures and events of Roosevelt's era. He has examined The Johnstown Flood and The Great Bridge (the Brooklyn Bridge) by the time he takes on bringing out the sense of destiny and adventure in linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that fills The Path Between the Seas. In the preface, McCullough states the 40 year project, 1870-1914, rivets the world, affects thousands of lives, revolutionizes finance capitalism and medicine, and advances engineering, government planning, and labor relations. The U.S. emerges as a world power as the Victorian Era ends. McCullough writes for the general reader, aiming at bringing out the causes of what happens in Panama, onsite and in vital political locales abroad, at discovering the nature of the age. He does this primarily...