Book: The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester

America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

A readable interesting book. It has five parts: Wood, Earth, Water, Fire and Metal, all contributing to and intertwined with the discoveries, explorations and development of America.

Winchester retells the familiar grand stories of our nation but also writes of more obscure adventurers, and scientists, geologists and visionaries…men many of us have never heard of, and acknowledges their contributions also, like the story of Calbraith Perry Rodgers for instance, "a flamboyant pioneer of early aviation [who] made the first transcontinental airplane flight between New York and Pasadena in the fall of 1911. It took seven weeks, interrupted by dozens of mishaps and and crashes."

There are the early explorations of our country, especially the Corps of Discovery led by Lewis and Clark with the help of Sacagawea, and John Wesley Powell's journey through the Grand Canyon, but also stories of the telephone, computers, radio, canals, dams, television, electricity, the telegraph, the Interstate system…

In 1919, General Eisenhower traveled with the Army Transcontinental Convoy as an observer on a road trip across the country on what turned out to be "deplorable roads, averaging 5.6 miles per hour on roads that were not suitable anywhere in Nebraska or Wyoming and …worse than useless in Utah. Most of Nevada was a near  trackless waste where the expedition got itself hopelessly lost...The roads were execrable…and the seed of the idea of the Interstate highway System had been planted." While it was eventually named after Eisenhower, "it was one Thomas MacDonald who…fashioned the billions of tons of concrete and steel in a such a manner as to make the notion whole..."

Thomas MacDonald is another of the men Winchester resurrects... "a half-forgotten man today but whose unforgettable legacy was to give Americans of all stations the ability to cross their country by road at speed and with ease…" And FDR was the man who argued for a four-lane divided highway.

The author tells a personal story of showing a 7-year-old in western Queensland in Australia what the Internet and World Wide Web could produce and how the boy was thrilled such that he "placed his hands gently across Gidgee's (his pet lamb) woolly face and pointed the creature's eyes directly at the screen. He lowered his head and, desperate to share the moment with his best friend, said solemnly to the little lamb, 'Look Gidgee! It's Mars!'"

This is a history book rich with detail but not boring, thanks to Winchester's gift of writing.