Product Description

In this account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage, Stephen E. Ambrose offers a historical successor to his universally acclaimed Undaunted Courage, which recounted the explorations of the West by Lewis and Clark.

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The Union had won the Civil War and slavery had been abolished, but Abraham Lincoln, who was an early and constant champion of railroads, would not live to see the great achievement. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes to life.

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. Locomo-tives, 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. This was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels through mountains.

At its peak, the workforce -- primarily Chinese on the Central Pacific, Irish on the Union Pacific -- approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as fifteen thousand workers on each line. The Union Pacific was led by Thomas "Doc" Durant, Oakes Ames, and Oliver Ames, with Grenville Dodge -- America's greatest railroad builder -- as chief engineer. The Central Pacific was led by California's "Big Four": Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, were latter-day Lewis and Clark types who led the way through the wilderness, living off buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope.

In building a railroad, there is only one decisive spot -- the end of the track. Nothing like this great work had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific tracks were joined.

Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men -- the famous and the unheralded, ordinary men doing the extraordinary -- who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the continent into a nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74317 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Amazon.com
Abraham Lincoln, who had worked as a riverboat pilot before turning to politics, knew a thing or two about the problems of transporting goods and people from place to place. He was also convinced that the United States would flourish only if its far-flung regions were linked, replacing sectional loyalties with an overarching sense of national destiny.

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

From Publishers Weekly
Eminent historian Ambrose notes that he once viewed the investors and businessmen who built the transcontinental railroad as robber barons who bilked the government and the public. But in his rough-and-tumble, triumphant sagaAsure to appeal to the many readers of Ambrose's bestseller Undaunted CourageAhe presents the continent-straddling railroad, yoking east and west at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, as a great democratic experiment, a triumph of capitalist organization, free labor, brains and determination that ushered in the American Century, galvanized trade and settlement, and made possible a national culture. To critics who charge that the railroad magnates were corrupt and grew obscenely rich and powerful through land grants and government bonds, Ambrose replies that the land grants never brought in enough money to pay the bills and, further, that the bonds were loans, fully paid back with huge interest payments. But this argument fails to convince, partly because Ambrose does a superlative job of re-creating the grim conditions in which the tracks were laid. The Central Pacific's workers were primarily Chinese, earning a dollar a day. Union Pacific workers were mostly Irish-American, young, unmarried ex-soldiers from both the Union and the Confederacy. Accidental deaths were commonplace, and the two companies, notwithstanding strikes, slowdowns and drunken vice, engaged in a frantic race, mandated by Congress, as the winner got the greater share of land and bonds. As a result of the haste, an enormous amount of shoddy construction had to be replaced. Native Americans, who wanted the iron rail out of their country, hopelessly waged guerrilla warfare against railroad builders who talked openly of exterminating them. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, letters, telegrams, newspaper accounts and other primary sources, Ambrose celebrates the railroad's unsung heroesAthe men who actually did the backbreaking work. 32 pages of b&w photos. 6-city author tour. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The transcontinental railroad was the greatest American engineering feat of the 19th century. It awed legions of reporters, photographers, and others in its own day and historians thereafter for its scale, innovation, and sheer brute strength. Ambrose (Undaunted Courage) is among those latter-day admirers. Relying on newspaper reportage, he presents the project through the eyes of the men working for the Union Pacific and Central Pacific and marvels at the blasting, gouging, grading, hauling, and more that transpire as the rival railroads punched through mountains, straddled gorges, and strode across the Plains in the race to link the continent. The cast is largeDarmies of skilled and eager Chinese workers, visionaries like surveyor Theodore Judah, and engineers and builders like Grenville Dodge, who marshaled huge sums of capital and solved intricate technical problems. Ambrose adds little to a much-told tale (his book does not supplant David Haward Bain's Empire Express, LJ 10/1/99), and he blinks at the ruthlessness and misery that made fortunes for the train barons. But in his hands every sledgehammer blow hits hard and every blast echoes. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-DRandall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A fine account of a remarkable achievement
'Nothing Like it In the World' by Stephen Ambrose

As usual, Mr. Ambrose delivers his straight forward, from the gut narrative of the construction and story behind the story of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad - a feat that inarguably changed America in profound ways. Meet the colorful characters who forced this project through, by sheer force of will and gain better perspective of the magnitude of labor and sometime exploitation of workers, particularly the Chinese. The financiers & government officials come through in this work in all their glory and shame - some deserved, others less so.

The power of the undertaking and dangers the workers faced, who truly are the main characters of this story, are exhibited in a voice as gravelly as that of Ambrose's own. The sheer enormity of this amazing feat is laid bare for the reader to digest and one is left feeling the passion of the original thought leaders of the RR down through the graders, spike drivers and general laborers who in an amazingly brief period of time changed the course of of American history in ways completely unseen.

If there is anything lacking, it would be the story of the Indians who are described as often terrorizing the railway workers to the point where men had to arm themselves for personal safety. The context of the Indians' story is lacking in this book, however, the argument could be made that it is an entirely different story. For that important component I would suggest, perhaps Dee Brown's 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee'.

All in all, the reader is taken back to pre-Lincoln presidency and carried through all the subsequent sweat and toil until the last spike was driven ....and American commerce and transportation and direction changed forever. It's well worth your time and no matter your thoughts on Stephen Ambrose, he'll always deliver an easily readable, passionate account of his subject matter. 'Nothing Like it in The World' is no exception. I highly recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in American history or the old West.

Nothing like it in the world
An Interesting book to read, a wonderful arrangement of facts. Once read you feel like you were alive during the building of the Transcontinental railroad, and had been following its progress in the local paper.

Not his best
A good book about the rail road, Ambrose doesn't write with the same passion as he does Lewis and Clark. New insight (for me) into the Big 5 in California.