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Ambrose, Stephen E. ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD
Ambrose, Stephen E.
2000 44910 From Barnes & Noble The Barnes & Noble Review What is there to say about the transcontinental railroad? That it was really long and very hard to build and took an awful lot of hammer-pounding? That's just the beginning.... Stephen Ambrose, author of such immensely popular histories as Undaunted Courage and D-Day, has created an enthralling account of the building of the transcontinental railroad, one riddled with ideas and facts, personalities and scandals. By the 1860s, there were a few powerful men who decided they wanted to see the railroad built and wanted to make a killing in the process. As Congress balked at sponsoring any one particular railroad route, these men formed two private companies, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, one at either terminus of the track-to-be. Ambrose details the political intrigue, bribery, and cajoling that went on between these men and members of government to get the money, land, and support needed to build this seemingly impracticable transcontinental track. But the narrative goes beyond politics and finances. After the introductory chapters, we take a year-by-year journey through the construction of the railroad itself, alternating chapters between the workings of the two companies. Ambrose describes the physical undertaking of finding a route through the mountains without the benefit of a bird's-eye view or a map, the men carrying their food and water and, never knowing what would lie ahead. He writes of the deadly hazards of using black powder to blast, inch by inch, through the Sierra Nevada range. We watch workers grade the road, lay the rails, and hammer the spikes to make the track grow, by manpower alone, at the astounding rate of one to two miles per day. We learn of the Chinese and Chinese-American workers who lived entire seasons in burrows beneath six feet or more of snow, drinking tea and exploding tunnels in the rock to lay track. We learn of the Irish and Irish-American workers building from the other terminus despite violent raids by furious Native Americans. In large part, this book is the story of the physical construction of the railroad and therefore an illustration of the audacity, perseverance, and even idealism of the men who built it. Kate Montgomery is a writer living in Brewster, New York. She is the coauthor of Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean. From the Publisher Nothing Like It in the World gives the account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage. It 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 sometimes 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 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. Publishers Weekly On May 10, 1869, telegraphers sent the word done from Promontory Point, Utah, throughout the nation, signaling the completion of what Walt Whitman referred to as "the road between Europe and Asia." The transcontinental railroad, which connected the vast American territories, cut the trip from New York City to San Francisco from many months to seven days. Ambrose's (Undaunted Courage) epic account, diligently and powerfully read by DeMunn, details the incredible mobilization of manpower and financing that was "the very embodiment of system." He tells it all with verve: the financial finagling, the impulse to simplify by "exterminating" Native Americans, the bac Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group 0-684-84609-8 / 9780684846095
Hardcover As New Condition New York
Price:
29.11 USD
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