Nothing Like It in the World

Rating:
Summary: Disappointment
Review: I wish I had read these reviews before asking Santa to put Ambrose's book in my stocking. The glaring errors contained therein spoiled my anticipated enjoyment. The Humboldt River arising in northeastern Utah?! McClellan's orders before Antietam known to Lee?! (Would that the latter had been the case for this Johnny Reb.) The readers are owed an apology by both author and publisher.

Rating:
Summary: Dee Brown's "Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow" MUCH better!!
Review: Dee Brown's "Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow" (1977) is notably better. Shorter, more entertaining and more informative details and anecdotes, more colorful, broader. (Dee Brown also wrote "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.") Sure there is a lot of interesting information here but it lacks drive and omits some of the big picture of the times. How could Ambrose completely omit the Kansas Pacific railroad which was building parallel tracks a couple of hundred miles away, and was in the competiton the first few years? Not a single word about the KP. And there are many other important persons and events of the same times and places (Mark Twain and and Custer come to mind) who illustrate the mileau of building the road that do not appear in the Ambrose book. One wonders what editors are for, and if any were paid for working on this book. In railroad history, whose writers range from entertaining pseudo-19th century flamboyance (Lucius Beebe) to detailed scholarship (Geo. Hilton), including many inspired amateurs, Ambrose's effort fails to distinguish itself. For the general reader Dee Brown's book is probably much better, more interesting, more enjoyable. I suppose technically speaking the Ambrose book is strictly about the men who built this one railroad, not about other railroads, not about Indian wars, not about the technology of the railroads and construction, and hence some criticism may be deflected. The general reader, expecting the drive of his World War II books, will be disappointed. If you love steam locomotives, you won't find much about them here.

Rating:
Summary: Nothing Like It in the World of Misconceptions
Review: An exciting read, but unfortunately so full of distracting and erroneous errors that it actually would have been better as an historical novel. The misrepresentations will probably lead to historians attempting to offset the errors in this work for years to come.

Rating:
Summary: Riveting description of an Amazing feat
Review: Ambrose departs from his usual subject (World Wars) in order to write a superb book describing the heroic efforts made to complete America's transcontinental railroad--a project which, amazingly, occurred during the middle of our Civil War.

Ambrose describes every level of the actual building, starting with the early visionaries who lobbied for the mid-continent route, the financiers, the engineers, the bosses, and even describes in remarkable detail (given the sparse historical record) the actual physical labor and living conditions of the thousands of regular working people who actually built the railroad.

Waht makes this feat (and thus the book) truly remarkable is that the entire project was done without a single power tool, without bulldozers, without cranes, and even before the invention of dynomite. Imagine blasting a long tunnel through the Sierra's, in the dead of winter, working in from both ends and out from the middle, and making the tunnels connect. Yet this is only one of the magnificent physical/engineering triumphs described by Ambrose.

So, why not five stars? Ambrose mentions that building the railroad led to the creation of the first two modern large corporations (the Union Pacific--working from Iowa west and the Cnetral Pacific--working from Sacramento east). He also details the huge amounts of cash which had to be raised to pay for materials and labor. Where the book is weak is in his description of where this money came from. Who were the investors? Where was this capital invested previously? One can get some idea of the answers to these questions by reading the recent biographies of the Rothschild family and JP Morgan. I would have liked to see those stories integrated into Ambrose's otherwise magnificent book.

Rating:
Summary: Very sloppy and lazy work...
Review: The subject is top-notch, the author is one of the best around, but this book fails to entertain. The material is thrown together without regard to scholarship. Was it written by Prof. Ambrose's students in History 101. Maybe, or it could have been that the author has resorted to pumping out material just to capitalize on his popularity. Take the maps of this book, they would have been helpful if they were positioned relevant to the material around them. The CP in California is discussed early in the book, so why is the map of their route placed at pg. 342 where the discussion is competition in Utah? When you locate the map you want, they frequently do not show the locations that Ambrose has identified as important milestones in the progress of the transcontinental project. Oregon is shown on the front and back flaps as a territory in 1869(in brackets). Perhaps, Mr Ambrose or his editor could have done one nanosecond of fact-checking to see that Oregon became a state in 1859, even before the Civil War! - the lack of detail is surprising. Mr. Ambrose attempted to tell a story about the greatness of this accomplishment but in that act he showed how sloppy his work can be.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: If you like history, this is a must-read. Ambrose's research is tremendous, and the story of the railroad is a part of American history. Read it! [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This book by Mr. Ambrose seems rambling and repetitive. It could have been shortened if he had re-read the previous chapters and reminded himself what he wrote last week! He seems to be doing what the UP and CP barons were guilty of doing, making a longer book to exact bigger profits, like they were accused of trying to make the railroad longer to get more government money for it. Mr. Ambrose also has the irritating habit of confusing "elevation" with "altitude", though whoever drew the maps got it right. Still the book is an interesting starting point if one wants to pursue the subject in depth, or plan a vacation to Green River.

Rating:
Summary: Ambrose needs a good editor
Review: It's interesting to read, but woefully repetitious in spots. Technically, Ambrose seems totally unfamiliar with his subject. I got the feeling he is neither a railroad buff nor mechanically inclined, for some of his descriptions of technical and mechanical aspects of the construction were pretty haphazard.

In general, I enjoyed reading it, but I wasn't impressed by the quality of writing, and I'm not at all sure of the reliability of its information.

Rating:
Summary: Not typical Ambrose; fact checking was incomplete
Review: Stephen Ambrose is in his element when he takes the actual words of those who lived and made history and spins them into a riveting human drama. "Undaunted Courage" relies mainly on the journals of Meriwether Lewis and Thomas Jefferson, and "Citizen Soldiers" retells the conquest of Germany by American GI's through their own narratives. Both are among the finest histories ever written.

"Nothing Like It" is a bit dustier. The author fashioned it principally on archival documents and newspaper accounts. He makes a noble attempt to spice up the story and analogize it to an exciting military campaign or to the Manhattan Project, but with only limited success. Granted, it reads much better than most texts, but it is closer to the American history studied in high school than to the taut tales we have come to expect of Ambrose. A good read, but not the best.

The fact checking by the editor is notably incomplete. Even as early as the inside front cover, an historical inaccuracy jumps out at you. The map indicates that Oregon was a territory in 1869. Oregon was in fact admitted into the Union in 1859, becoming the 33rd state.

Rating:
Summary: Not out of this world
Review: While I am a fan of much of Ambrose's history and biographical writing, this book did not meet my expectations. It lacked other than Dodge, a really strong central character. It failed to follow up & describe how the railroad impacted the economic development of California & the west after building up the problems of travel pre-war. How many more people traveled? What was the increase in trade? How many people settled along the route? What happened to the workers, especially the Chinese?