Longest Line on the Map

The brilliant, award-winning author of American Canopy presents a dazzling account of the epic quest to link North and South America with the world's longest road--the Pan American Highway--and how its construction and evolution reflected the divergent fates of North, Central, and South America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Pan-American Highway is the longest road in the world, running the length of the Western Hemisphere from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in South America. It represents a dream of friendship, commerce, mobility, of the Americas united. Our collective imaginations have been forged along its path: Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the iconic Argentine revolutionary, traveled it northward in The Motorcycle Diaries; Jack Kerouac, the voice of the beat generation, followed it southward in On the Road. Many adventurers have