Eric Rutkow

This is a nonfiction book about how the abundance of trees in the U.S. intersected with development of our nation. An interesting topic and one that worked very well for large sections of the book and less well in others. I really enjoyed the first half of this book. Rutkow writes about how valued trees were to European settlers. They were used for housing, fencing, furniture, etc. But also for ship building - especially exciting was the abundance of very tall straight trees that could be used for masts. He talks about trees used for food (apple, orange, chestnut, etc.) He moves into talking about lumber mills and paper mills and the progression of mindset from "the trees are there for us to use in whatever way we need", to conservation, to environmentalism. I also was interested in the section about the American Chestnut and the Elm tree that were decimated by introduced fungi.

As you can see, he casts a wide net and covers a lot of topics. I preferred those that really kept trees as the focus. Some of the chapters were too much about politics. And it was also sad, though not a new idea, to delve in to all the ways we've ruined our forests. The long section on paper mills lost my interest.

Overall, I am glad I read this book, but it wasn't quite as good as I wanted it to be. Or maybe I just wanted a different focus than the author chose. Either way, it's a soft recommendation from me.… (mehr)

Three books in one, this, and at least one of them is on topic. The first and longest book concerns itself with nineteenth-century efforts to build a Pan-American railroad. Although this topic has a reasonable claim to be useful backstory to a book which purports to be about the Pan-American Highway, it deserves perhaps twenty-five pages instead of its bloated, tangent-ridden course which includes everything from a mini-history of Trans-Mississippi railroading to chapter-and-verse on Central American and Mexican politics of the period. The second section, on the United States' Good Roads Movement, is even less relevant and should have been omitted entirely. Finally, 200 pages in, we get to the Pan-American Highway, and the book is good thereafter. I have no complaints about the author's scholarship or writing style (well, except that why does he keep referring to "Panama and Central America--which part of East Africa does he think Panama's in, anyway?). Getting all these excrescences out of the book would have given him space to write about the course of the highway in South America, about which he says next to nothing. This book could have been a 200-page foccaccia oizza instead of a 360-page lump of unleavened dough.… (mehr)

During the time I spent reading this book, I had to keep convincing myself that this was worth my investment of time, as while I was informed, there was no denying that this work was just not hanging together. A big part of the problem is that "Pan-Americanism" was probably always just a glorified marketing slogan, and being a little more forthright about that reality would have served Rutkow well; not that I would accuse him of naivete. Secondly, there are really two different construction projects under consideration here; the effort to build a railroad in the 19th century, and the effort to build a commercial-grade highway in the 20th century. Both failed from issues of funding, the hostile climate, political skepticism across various countries, and the ultimately overriding issue of whether there was enough value to justify the investment.

As matters stand now, the route could be completed, if the will was there. The bottom line is that between the environmental issues, and the basic reality that Panama simply doesn't want a closer relationship with Colombia, the Darien "Gap" is not going to be closed anytime soon. That might illustrate what the ultimate problem always was with Pan-Americanism, it was mostly about linking the settler societies of North and South America, and didn't offer a lot of unalloyed value to the communities of Central America.… (mehr)