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 enlarge | Author: Richard Rayner
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $10.17
You Save: $4.78 (32%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 2046418
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
ISBN: 0393333612
Dewey Decimal Number: 650
EAN: 9780393333619
ASIN: 0393333612
Publication Date: January 5, 2009 (In 120 Days)
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Availability: Not yet published
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 6-7 of 7 | | « PREV | | |
 A terrific book on the railroads and California history February 2, 2008
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
This is a quick well-written and readable guide to the building of the railroads as it relates to California. It tells the story of the Big 4, aka The Associates - Hunitington, Stanford, Hopkins and Crocker - four merchants who came out of almost nowhere and ended up controlling the biggest railroad empire in America. In earlier books Rayner has written about con men and the shady sides of business and I was worried that he might approach the story from that angle. But he ends up liking them, warts and all, and his picture of the scheming Huntington is especially good. Another interesting thing that Rayner points out is how our thinking about the railroads these days is almost entirely the product of the changing ways in which they've been written about in different intellectual phases of history. He gives us a tour of the sources, from the muckraking days to more modern historians who take the "greed is good" argument. Rayner doesn't take sides especially. I also have to say that as a professor of U.S. history specializing in the period in question, I found nothing to object to within these pages; the previous reviewer's complaints have the sound of someone who was trawling for things to carp about; for example, his point regarding Throg's Neck: this is a body of water and an adjoining neighborhood in the Bronx, so there is no error here at all. If you are looking for a one-volume history of the railroads in the Golden State, this is a fresh and neat little book.
 Too Many Fabrications January 27, 2008
14 out of 21 found this review helpful
This book is mostly quotations from, references to, and inferences based on secondary sources. These are held together by the author's questionable scholarship. Can you trust a book that would claim a meeting in 1859 in Washington with "the senator from Illinois, a certain Abraham Lincoln?" Every schoolchild is taught that Lincoln may have bested Douglas in his debates with him but that he lost the senatorial election. And when Collis Huntington dies, the book inters him in a mausoleum in the nonexistent "Throg's Neck on Long Island." How the author could claim this is dumbfounding. For those not familiar with New York geography, Throg's Neck is in the Bronx, also the location of Woodlawn Cemetery, which is the final resting place of Huntington but nowhere near Throg's Neck. The building of the transcontinental railroad and how the Southern Pacific railroad dominated California is an interesting tale; it deserves better than its treatment in The Associates.
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