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 UnionPacific 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.


EDITORIAL REVIEW

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 backbreaking work and the fierce competition between railroad companies that fueled the effort. This gritty, momentous tale of the personalities that pressed across the wild American West with rail and tie celebrates the feat that brought the U.S. into the modern age. Simultaneous release with the S&S hardcover and trade paperback. (Forecasts, July 3). (Aug.)n Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

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 large--armies 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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/00.]--Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

New York Times Book Review - Henry Kisor
Ambrose's scholarship seems impeccable, supported by copious notes and an extensive bibliography. He writes a brisk, colloquial, straightforward prose . . . [It] may be a popular history, but it is also a complex one.