Word: mcculloughs
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...PATH BETWEEN THE SEAS by DAVID McCULLOUGH 698 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...Path Between the Seas looks back with frank admiration on the men and machines that toiled 44 years to join the Atlantic and Pacific oceans at the Isthmus of Panama. Historian David McCullough, 44, author of The Johnstown Flood and The Great Bridge, skirts such contemporary controversies as U.S. control over the Canal Zone. There is matter enough for him in history. The isthmus belonged to Colombia until 1903, when the U.S., under Teddy Roosevelt, encouraged a local revolt and sent American warships to block the landing of Colombian troops. Congressional doves objected to the gunboat diplomacy, but they were...
...Author McCullough describes the building of the canal as if it were a war. Its best-remembered hero was Colonel George Washington Goethals, chief overseer of the project, but equal credit must go to William Gorgas, the Army doctor who wiped out the disease-carrying mosquitoes, and John Stevens, a rough, amiable Westerner who refused to start digging until there were adequate warehouses, railroad facilities, housing and hospitals...
...merit. With the broadest strokes and the most perfervid prose, the novel traces three generations of the Cleary family-from poverty in New Zealand to wealth in Australia to triumphs on the London stage and in the Vatican. None of the Clearys, however, is as interesting as Australia itself. McCullough knows how to stage convincing droughts, floods and fires. Even her descriptions of landscapes sometimes flare into life...
...domesticated as a mate for the governess heroine. If this deep psychological lode still runs through newly raised consciousnesses, then The Thorn Birds will probably clean up as handsomely as its promoters hope. In any case, its fate will be a barometer of taste circa the late '70s. McCullough has not made literature. For a season or so, her book will make commercial history. Paul Gray