Nothing Like It In the World : The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869
by Stephen E. Ambrose

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Book Reviews of Nothing Like It In the World : The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

Book Review: Audio version is Engrossing, Moves Quickly
Summary: 5 Stars

Summary of Nothing Like It In the World : The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869

The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

Building a transcontinental railroad, writes the prolific historian Stephen Ambrose, was second only to the abolition of slavery on Lincoln's presidential agenda. Through an ambitious program of land grants and low-interest government loans, he encouraged entrepreneurs such as California's "Big Four"--Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford--to take on the task of stringing steel rails from ocean to ocean. The real work of doing so, of course, was on the shoulders of immigrant men and women, mostly Chinese and Irish. These often-overlooked actors and what a contemporary called their "dreadful vitality" figure prominently in Ambrose's narrative, alongside the great financiers and surveyors who populate the standard textbooks.

In the end, Ambrose writes, Lincoln's dream transformed the nation, marking "the first great triumph over time and space" and inaugurating what has come to be known as the American Century. David Haward Bain's Empire Express, which covers the same ground, is more substantial, but Ambrose provides an eminently readable study of a complex episode in American history. --Gregory McNamee

General Books

• History > Americas > United States > 19th Century
• Old West
• Reconstruction
• General
• Civil War > General
• World > General
• Transportation > Railroads
• Nonfiction > Transportation > Railroads > General