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 enlarge | Author: Stephen E. Ambrose
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  211 reviews
Sales Rank: 38590
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 432
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 0743203178
Dewey Decimal Number: 385.0973
EAN: 9780743203173
ASIN: 0743203178
Publication Date: November 6, 2001
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| Customer Reviews:
 The've Been Working On The Railroad! April 19, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Nothing Like It In The World" tells the awe inspiring story of the building of the trans-continental railroad. This fact filled book reads like a novel. Stephen Ambrose covers a story with a breath of the continent. He addresses all aspects of the project including choices of routes, construction challenges, labor, financing and the race for government subsidies.
Ambrose explains how the transcontinental railroad interacted with so many of the issues and personalities in mid 19th century America. One of the road's greatest boosters was the railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln. Ambrose makes the case that the North-South rivalry prevented construction of the road until the Civil War withdrew Southern interests from political debate. Surrender at Appomatox freed an army of young laborers to lay the track among the competing communities.
Ambrose delves into the economics of the project, emphasizing the role of the Army. The increased mobility available to the Army resulted in tremendous cost savings to the government, ensuring the support of Generals Grant and Sherman..
Alternative funding schemes from government construction and ownership through private construction, either with or without government subsidy, are examined. The fact was that the government was the only organization capable of financing the road. Contrary to the image of railroad finance as a corrupt cash grab, Ambrose shows it as a win-win arrangement. Ambrose points out that, between the savings to the Army, interest paid on government bonds and increased value of government retained land, the project turned a large profit to the government. The race to lay track in order to get the most bonds and land grants spurred the companies to complete the roads with unanticipated haste.
I like books that help me see things in a differently. Ambrose reminds us that, before the development of the railroad, neither people, goods nor information could travel much faster than they had in Caesar's time.. Before this book, I had not realized the connection between the Civil War and the railroad. Now I see it both from the perspective of the dominance of Northern interests and the availability of manpower. The idea that all rails, nails and some other materials for the Central Pacific had to be transported to California from the East Coast, either around Tierra del Fuego or across Panama boggles the mind but, on reflection, is understandable. Descriptions of the tremendous construction projects of bridges and trestles demands our admiration. The tremendous shortening in the time needed for transportation shows this project to truly alter America's self image. "Nothing Like It In The World" changes my view of this crucial episode in America's history. For this it earns five stars.
 And they didn't even tell you how long it was April 1, 2005
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I spent 3 weeks reading this book and I can't remember a single instance in which Ambrose told me exactly how long the darn thing was. He spends WAY too much time telling me how the land was selected and the politics surrounding the whole thing, and not enough time talking about how they built it. The last 1/2 to 1/3 of the book is pretty good, but it just takes too long to get there.
If I could give it 1.5 stars I would because it is pretty well written, but what Ambrose chose to leave out and what he chose to put in just didn't make a lot of sense to me.
 Interesting popular account, not always balanced March 23, 2005
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this popular, uncritical history of the building of the transcontinental railroad, though I was also somewhat baffled by some of the books emphases and the author's frequent either hesitancy or inability to draw some of the larger conclusions of the event. Nonetheless, read with caution the book provides an admirable introduction to one of the crucial events in American history, and certainly the most readily available edition.
Before saying what I liked and what I didn't like about the book, I have to add a word of agreement with those who were rather stunned at how poorly written the book is. While it is indeed a bit longer than it needs to be, what amazed me even more was how poorly written it is. Ambrose's prose is almost aggressively banal at times, such as when he writes, "Decisions, once made, cannot be unmade. A thing is what it is." Unfortunately, such lapses are frequent in the book. Such a lapse is not the fault merely of the author, but of the editor and copyeditor. Someone should have called his attention to a host of "sentences that do not do, in philosopher Gilbert Ryle's happy characterization, "any work."
The virtues of the book is that he manages to bring into his narrative all of the major characters, all of the major events, and all of the essential elements, even if his story sometimes skips over key points. In all of the books he wrote after ceasing to be a serious scholar, Ambrose loves to write books around heroic figures. The problem with the railroad saga is that so many of the major characters were quite reprehensible. Ambrose's solution is to mute or ignore or only touch lightly upon their personal nastiness. The result is one of the least condemnatory accounts of the Big Four, the Ames brothers, Doc Durant, and the other key figures that exists. Less controversially, Ambrose does a much better job with such figures as the tragic Theodore Judah, the visionary who died before the railroad was begun but whose unflagging effort on its behalf did more than anyone to get it started. Likewise, Grenville Dodge emerges as a remarkably admirable individual, the Union Pacific's bookend to the Central Pacific's Judah. And Ambrose lavishes extensive praise on the nameless thousands who slaved on the railroad, especially the Chinese, who went from being profoundly discriminated against to gaining near universal admiration within the railroad building community for their exceptional skills as workers. Ambrose also acknowledges the key role that Abraham Lincoln played in getting the railroad off the ground.
My complaints with the book, apart from the rather flat style, are twofold. First, even when he hints briefly at the significance of some fact, he always draws back from expanding and developing it. For instance, in mentioning Lincoln's role, he could have but didn't tie it in with Lincoln's wider views about national unity. In his second annual address to Congress, what today would be called the State of the Union, Lincoln evoked an understanding of the nation that no one else of his time possessed. In looking at the national river system, Lincoln found the nation indivisibly unified by geography. Unlike many European nations, the United States possessed no natural geographical divisions, excepting perhaps Maine and the area west of the Great Divide. The river system of necessity unified Illinois and Mississippi, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The country was naturally a nation. One function that Lincoln saw the railroad playing, mentioned briefly by Ambrose, was in unifying the nation even further, even in bringing those areas west of the Rockies into the Union. This grand vision under girt much of Lincoln's work in preserving the Union, but Ambrose scarcely alludes to it. But without it, the precise reason why Lincoln was so avid to build the railroad cannot be fully understood.
Likewise, as Ambrose notes the railroads were the first great corporations in American history. Before this, the largest nationwide concerns were connected with the shipping industry or with fur trading. Connected to this is the fact that before the many fortunes made by people working in some relation to the railroad industry represented the first class of spectacularly rich individuals in American history. Before the 1860s and 1870s, the number of very rich Americans in the nation's history could be counted on the fingers of two hands. There had been Steven Girard, the shipping magnate, and later Cornelius Vanderbilt in the same concern, while John Jacob Astor made his fortune in furs and real estate. Today with literally thousands of millionaires and more than a dozen billionaires, we take for granted the existence of the super rich. But such was unheard of in 1860s America. The railroad and its supporting industries or the industries it enabled created the first widespread mega-wealth in the nation's history. This is one of the major stories connected with the development of the railroad, but Ambrose barely touches upon it.
My other main complaint with the book is the book's moral agnosticism with regard to the main figures. Yes, he does state many of the misdeeds of many of the key figures in both the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, and mentions in several passages the scandals connected with the Crédit Mobilier, but the space he allots to it is rather amazing given its stature in American history. The Crédit Mobilier debacle ranks with the Teapot Dome scandal or Iran-Contra or Watergate in the great horrors in American history.
Part of this might be because Ambrose might have an axe to grind. In a rather amazing passage near the end of the book, Ambrose takes umbrage with a number of mainstream historians who see in the building of the transcontinental railroad a series of the greatest outrages perpetuated by business interests in American history. Ambrose does this unfairly by focusing on their criticisms of the land grants and the bonds, the latter which he correctly notes were not gifts but loans. What Ambrose does is overlook the rest of the overwhelmingly massive case against the primary figures of the Crédit Mobilier. One does not need to turn to socialist histories of the era such as Matthew Josephson's marvelous THE ROBBER BARONS for an accounting of the sins of the age. A host of progressive historians such as Charles Beard or mainstream historians such as Samuel Eliot Morrison or even conservative historians such as Daniel Boorstin would balance Ambrose's mildly whitewashed account. And all of these historians, I should note, are more highly regarded by scholars than Ambrose. What Ambrose simply refuses to state flatly is that many of the key leaders in the building of the railroad, men like Stanford, Huntington, Hopkins, Crocker, Durant, and the Ames were monumentally greedy men, bent on self-aggrandizement and profit at any cost. Ambrose lays out all the evidence for this, but then curiously refuses to connect the dots. One wonders if political ideology prevents from drawing a conclusion that graphically demonstrates the dangers of unregulated big business, but whatever the motive, it is a massive blemish on the book.
Despite these rather sizable flaws in the work, the book is nonetheless a fun and very interesting read. No doubt this is in large part because it truly is one of the great stories in American history. One could argue that with the completion of the railroad, the United States truly did become one nation. Ambrose illustrates this also by pointing out that it was the first event following the Civil War that caused great rejoicing not only in the former Union, but in the former Confederacy. Hopefully, a more gifted historian and better writer will take up this story in a popular history at some point in the future. Until then, this book, despite its flaws, provides an entertaining account of one of the defining accomplishments in American history.
Paid by the word March 15, 2005
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Not being familliar with Ambrose's work, we're not sure if all his books are written like like this, but it seems that he was padding the text to be paid by the word! Repetitions of entire blocks of text, while admittedly properly footnoted and/or indexed give the book the feel of a report written by a highschooler.
Great Achievement! Book needs maps October 13, 2004
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The building of the transcontinental railroad was one of our greatest achievements. Ambrose is able to put us in the time period, where 500 barrels of blasting powder are used per day to blast the way through mountains to make tunnels for the railroad. Chinese are the ones to do the blasting as white folks are too scared to do it.
The advent of dynamite adds a new dimension, with it much greater power, and it's unpredictibality as to when it will explode.
Finding out that Lincoln was a railroad fan was interesting.
The idea that they had to do all this without bulldozers, cranes, etc. I found facinating. The ability to lay over a mile a day, 6 miles in one day, by hand is amazing.
It takes years here in Atlanta to get a single overpass completed.
The stories of the financial theivery are interesting, by the rail barons and congressmen.
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