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THE PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS, by David McCullough

At the outset, I have to admit that I’m biased, as McCullough is probably my favorite author, and I recommended reading the book to our Books, Brew and Banter Club. That said, The Path Between the Seas won the National Book Award and several other awards, so I feel confident that it would be next to impossible for me to oversell his work.

The book is a first-rate drama of the bold engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph. It is the story of the men who fought against all odds to fulfill a four-century dream of constructing a passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which includes astonishing engineering undertakings, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, tragic failures and heroic successes.

When Europeans first started to explore the possibilities of creating a link between the oceans, cutting off the long and dangerous journey round the southern tip of South America at Cape Horn, Panama was a remote part of Columbia. That changed when, in 1848, prospectors struck gold in California, creating an urgent need for quicker passage for California-bound ships. Thus, the United States built the Panama Railroad to serve that traffic and soon became the highest-priced stock on the New York Exchange.

Initially, building the canal appeared to be an easy matter, but the construction project eventually came to involve the efforts of thousands of workers from many nations, taking over four decades to complete.

In the beginning, French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, secured capital to begin work on the canal, based on his recent success in constructing the Suez Canal between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. However, at the time, he had not set foot in Panama and had only a vague idea of the topographical setting, nor did he believe that the heat, humidity, insects, and snakes were a large problem. In less than a decade, however, the scheme had collapsed, and his company went into receivership with only a third of the canal having been excavated. Over 25,000 people died, including 5,000 Frenchmen, mostly succumbing to malaria, yellow fever, poisonous snakes and industrial accidents.

After a quarter century, President Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign of intervention, and negotiated a treaty to access to the Isthmus of Panama, allowing the US to buy-out the French interests. However, the Americans led a bloodless revolt after Columbia objected to the treaty, allowing for the creation of the Republic of Panama. Americans then set work along the French route using their equipment and the Panama Railroad, before shipping in more modern equipment to move billions of cubic yards of dirt and rock, to harness savage rivers, and to initiate an unprecedented lock system, that has lasted over a century, only recently being remodeled and opened again to larger ships.

Aside from President Roosevelt, two other Americans were heroes in this process. Dr. William Gorgas found that mosquitos were the carrier of malaria and yellow fever and led efforts to destroy their breeding grounds, substantially reducing deaths from disease. Engineer John Stevens took charge of the canal project and quickly understood the French inability to remove rock and dirt was not a problem with digging, but transportation. So he led efforts to rebuild the Panama Railroad to transport not only people, but equipment and materials, and recruited the greatest engineering minds of the period to tackle the tremendous challenges.

Completing the canal was an impressive trial, but it got done. Eventually, the canal opened to traffic ahead of schedule and under budget, and became the useful waterway of commerce envisioned for centuries.

This comprehensive and captivating story is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the history of engineering technology, international intrigue, advance of medicine and human drama. Clearly, McCullough wrote a story you won’t want to put down.

—Ken Johnson

Room, by Emma Donoghue

Best-selling, award-winning novel and motion picture, nominated for four Academy Awards

Room is a good story from start to finish. But what makes it so effective and so captivating is that it is told in its entirely by one of its main characters, Jack, in his five-year-old voice.

Jack has lived his entire life in an 11×11 foot, windowless room. He was born there. He and his “Ma” eat, sleep, play and live there, intentionally hidden from the outside world. At night Ma shuts Jack into the wardrobe, safe and hopefully asleep when “Old Nick” chooses to visit.

But while “Room” is home to Jack, to Ma it is the prison where she has been held captive for seven years, since she was kidnapped when she was 19. She is repeatedly raped by Old Nick who enters Room any night he pleases. Jack is the result of one of those rapes.

Jack’s observations are bright, often insightful and reflect the good education his mother has managed to give him despite very limited tools. She teaches him to read, to think and to question. She makes up creative games to increase his vocabulary and give him a love for books, hoping to prepare him somewhat for the outside world. Together they create “word sandwiches”—if something is both cool and scary is is “coolary.” Jack’s observations when he finally is able to see the outside world through a window are all his own. He calls the sun “God’s face.”

While Ma is depressed and fiercely determined to escape, she is loves her young son and creates the best life and most loving environment she can for him.

But Jack’s curiosity and her own desperation are building and she knows she must find a way for them to escape from Room. They make a harrowing escape into the “Outside.”But now they must make huge and very different adjustments—Jack into a world full of people, sunshine, wind, buildings, cars and loud unfamiliar sounds everywhere. And Ma now finds herself in a familiar but very changed world. While her family and friends hoped and prayed she was still alive they could have had no idea what her life had become: motherhood, repeated rapes, imprisonment in a small room with no windows, completely cut off from the outside world.

Ma and Jack are frightened, but of different things and for different reasons. We watch them both in their separate struggles, hear Jack describe his new world, his fear, awe, and his worry about his Ma and her own very different struggle to adjust.

The continuing thread is the unconquerable love and determination Jack and his Ma share—the diamond-hard love between a mother and her child.

— Gail Stilwill

Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

Once when I was working in the garden, a bee plummeted out of the blue and dove into the heart of a hollyhock and stayed in there a long time, maintaining a little motion and humming, gorging. Eventually, he crawled out, sat a spell, and lifted off heavily. He literally couldn’t fly straight. After a couple of lazy loops and bemused U-turns he disappeared over the hedge.

That’s a fair description of what can happen to readers of Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings, a book about the catatonic, post-encephalitic patients Dr. Sacks treated at Mt. Carmel hospital when he went there as a young neurologist in 1966. We readers dive in because both author and book are so widely acclaimed (ten other well-received books and countless articles and lectures from Sacks; a movie and various stage plays from the book.)

Like the bee, we find lots to feed on: several prefaces and forewords as the book has gone through different editions. A twenty-five-page prologue. And then the heart: The compelling stories of twenty patients who awoke from their long sleep (brought on by encephalitis) after being administered L-Dopa (one of the very early psychotropic meds). In this section, there are surely as many lines of footnotes as of body. And they aren’t necessarily boring footnotes that the reader wants to skip.

Then there is a forty-page riff, in a section called Perspectives, on how illness fits into Western culture, history, philosophy, and literature. And a thirty-five-page epilogue to the 1982 edition and a brief postscript to the 1990 edition. Plus eighty pages of appendices (an interesting series of essays/papers that has an “Oh, and everything else interesting on the subject . . .” feel to it). Followed by a glossary (useful for medical terms), a bibliography, and an index.

In the middle of the book is an inset of haunting photographs of Mt. Carmel patients caught in catatonic sleep and their poignant awakenings. There are also clips from the media: Sleepy Sickness Spreading: Fatal Cases: Hunt for Elusive Germ: 20,000 Cases Last Year: Epidemic Worst In Britain and Italy: Record Death Toll.

That’s why the reader comes out sated. A little over-fed. Stunned. Sacks was (he died this year) a brilliant neurologist and a deeply compassionate physician. He had the imagination and audacity to experiment with new chemistry and awaken catatonic patients; he had the sorrow of watching them eventually regress and suffer and die.

Perhaps one reason Sacks has been so embraced as a person, physician, and writer is that he felt the humanity of illness. In the section called Perspectives, he writes “Diseases have a character of their own, but they also partake of our character; we have a character of our own, but we also partake of the world’s character: character is monadic or microcosmic, worlds within worlds within worlds, worlds which express worlds. The disease-the man-the world go together and cannot be considered separately as things-in-themselves.”

In our current specialized, assembly line, code-for-payment medical industrial complex, who can help but feel nostalgia for that humanity?

— Sharelle Moranville