Nothing Like It in the World

Additional Nothing Like It in the World Information

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.

What Customers Say About Nothing Like It in the World:

Was the so-American competition between corporations, with government incentives, a good idea, despite the flaws. How did these people do it, blasting through mountains and spanning gorges and everything else in adverse conditions. In that retrospective, Ambrose addressed charges of corruption and other negatives, coming down on the relatively positive side while conceding at least some obvious negatives. Ambrose thought so. He doesn't whitewash our mistreatment of the Indians or the Chinese laborers, so the history seemed fairly balanced, although experts may disagree. The audio book is an abridgment, and it seems to have reduced, but not eliminated, the repetition mentioned in various reviews of the full book.

The result was an adequate survey of this hugely important project, from concept and its critical early steps through the golden spike and an assessment of the railroad's importance. Simply awesome. I did not approach the book as the definitive treatment of the railroad, given that Mr. The main impression left, and one that Ambrose no doubt wanted to achieve, was awe in the accomplishment itself, akin to the moon landing and other monumental engineering, logistic and financial breakthroughs. I did, too, before listening to the book, and still do. Ambrose was not well known in this historical area, and an expectation of a certain level of cheerleading, based on familiarity with some of his other books.

The early interest of candidate Abraham Lincoln was a pleasant surprise for me to learn about, and Ambrose had sufficient telling anecdotes and detail to maintain interest throughout the project.

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I do have one question, just to be contrary as usual. As the author the late Stephen Ambrose, previously known more for his historical works chronicling the war leaders and dog soldiers of his generation, the generation of my parents, the so-called "greatest generation" that survived the Great Depression of the 1930s and fought World War II, has noted this Herculean task was done using the most basic pre-capitalist methods, simple tools and man power, lots of man power. Why were the rails only nationalized, if at all, after those private railroads went belly-up with the advent of mass production automobiles and super highways ( of which one, I-80, follows the basic CP-UP route from Omaha) in the late 20th century. As to the dreams, that was the easy part and affected everyone in pre-Civil War America from the old railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln to such well-known speculators and Gilded Age figures as Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins and Coliss Huntington.

That said, it is one thing to be in favor of such an outcome, another to see how, in the specific circumstances of the vast North American land mass, that state was to be unified. As we know the later tales of railroad finacing after 1869, like the Credit Mobilier scandal, not covered in the book, made some of today's financial shenanigans look tame by comparison. I have spend a great amount of time, and I believe rightly so, in drawing out the lessons of the struggle against slavery as they were played out as the great task of the American Civil War of the mid-19th century. I have mentioned, generally in passing, that the other great task of that fight was the preservation (and extension) of a continental nation-state by the victory of the Union forces. When completed in a few years time , as he also noted, the United States looked, or rather would look shortly thereafter light years different that the simple agrarian society projected by the founders of the country. Ambrose lays it out in a very compelling and easy to read way, although a minor fault is a too frequent repetition of the facts in one chapter being used again in another in order to bulk up a narrative with a pretty straightforward theme.

Why was this project not done as a national task by the central government. As to the plan- private enterprise (backed by the government) was the order of the day and the route, finally established after much political dickering, through the center of the country with two competing lines-the Central Pacific (now part of today's Southern Pacific -the sight of which when I travel in the West still makes me nostalgic) and the aptly-named Union Pacific. drove the thing forward, through thick and thin. Needless to say the heroes of this story who left no diaries or other writings are those workers who toiled endlessly and effectively to completion. Today, in our digital age, we are probably closer to those who created the transcontinental railroad society that they were to the hundred of generations before them who walked or used horses to do their traveling.Of course, this railroad story is a rather good cautionary tale about the virtues and vices of capitalism, capitalists and the onset of the "Gilded Age" that the railroads, their financing and their political clout would speed up. As to the hard work, mainly done by my Irish forbears on the UP side and the Chinese (with important help from the Mormons in Utah) on the CP side, as detailed by Ambrose represents the first inkling of what industrial mass production would look like later. As Karl Marx did, steeped as he was in the traditions of historical materialism, I too saw the creation of a unitary capitalist state at that time as a historically progressive outcome.

As to the massive engineering task forgotten names like Ted Judah and the Civil War general, Grenville Dodge. This is a tale of dreams, plans, power, greed, more greed, hard work, hard living, hard drinking and hard dying. The subject of this book, the struggle to create a transcontinental railroad, goes a long way to understanding how that task was accomplished, not only as a marvelous engineering feat but as a spur to a more systematic capitalist mode of mass production. This then is not a laconic tale of hoboes jungled up along some railroad right of way or "riding the blinds" or taking to the road in search of adventure as Kerouac's "beat" generation did.

The lifestyle and hard times those people endured to bring this country together should be honored with a National Holiday. I gained a whole new outlook on the worth of the Chinese coolies and the Mormons with their strong work ethics. This book enlighten me from the begining to the ending. It's rich in history, especially rich in describing the lifestyles, the work ethics, and the shananagans that went on from the people funding the projects to those who worked the project.