Rating: 
Summary: Looks like he missed the train
Review: This was Ambrose's first that I put down in the middle. Filled with repetition, lacking in color. And most sadly, the end left me hanging, wondering, wishing.
Rating: 
Summary: The Long and Winding Road
Review: Nothing Like it in the World is a wonderful book. It easily illustrated the similarities and difference between the Central and Union Pacific railroads. It explores the lives of its creators and the journey it took to reach their goal. However, I regret to say the ending was slightly disappointing. He failed in my view to fully explain the financial difficulties of the railroads. Overall, it was wonderful and very enjoyable book. It is well worth the ride.
Rating:
Summary: A marvelous tale. told well but imperfectly
Review: Stephen Ambrose is a competent historian and author with a knack for picking great stories. In "Nothing Like it in the World," he returns to the American West after many years writing about WWII. "Nothing Like It" picks up some 60 years after the Lewis & Clark expedition of which Ambrose wrote so well in "Undaunted Courage." In "Nothing Like It" Ambrose tells the story of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad.Surely Ambrose can be forgiven the hyperbole he uses to describe that railroad. Repeatedly, he describes it as the greatest engineering project of all time (what about the Great Wall, the Pyramids, the Chunnel?). If that is an extravagent claim, however, it is not far off the mark. After all, the railroad doubtless sped the development of the American West, sopped up lots of Civil War veterans who might otherwise have gotten into serious trouble, and helped ensure that the United States would remain united east and west. Yet, in some respects, Ambrose's description of the railroad's beneficial effects is surprisingly superficial. the sale of railroad securities, for example, created the modern American capital markets, yet their role in doing so is given little, if any, attention. In addition, the railroads were the first modern public corporations but the precedent of professional management they created is ignored in favor of sensationalist reporting on the "Big Four" and other magnates. Ambrose's incessant jingoism gets old. He disregards the extent to which British capital contributed to the railroads, for example, while emphasizing that American did it first and best. The surprisingly high number of factual errors is also annoying. The biggest boner probably is the statement on page 292 that "George B. McClellan's uncoded orders were captured by the Confederates before the battle of Antietam, giving Robert E. Lee a chance to read them." Sorry, but it was the other way round. Despite these flaws, however, "Nothing Like It" is still recommended. Ambrose writes well, the story is worth telling, and the race to the finish really does get quite exciting. The last third of the book really flies, even if the first third takes a while to get rolling. Wait for the paperback, perhaps, but do give it a go.
Rating: 
Summary: What's happened to Stephen Ambrose?
Review: Why would a writer with such great books as "Nixon" and "Lewis and Clark" behind him bring out a book that is so lacking in objectivity? Is it because he got a free, special train ride, as he notes in the preface of his book? He compares the building of the transcontinental railroad to mankind's greatest accomplishments! Well, it wasn't and writing won't make it so. Either he's losing his edge or he received a tidy inheritance from one of the Big Four (here in California, Southern Pacific is still considered an insatiable octopus.) Actually, no stars for this one, as I gave up midway through the book.
Rating:
Summary: Maybe the stagecoach wasn't so bad after all.
Review: About halfway through "Nothing Like It in the World", the author describes the formidable task faced by the Central Pacific Railroad in building the Summit tunnel through the Sierra Nevada mountains. This achievement, blasting a 1700 foot tunnel through solid rock with progress measured in inches per day, must have been enormously frustrating. Unfortunately, I felt some of that same discomfort in tryng to plow through this book, which I found remarkably colorless given the enormity and historical significance of the subject. Inadequately illustrated and mapped (there are occasional references to photographs that are not included and place names that do not appear on the maps), the book's style is often a confusingly tossed-together array of facts and quotes that somehow fail to capture and inspire the imagination. The descriptions of the major players from the worlds of politics, business and engineering are there of course, but they are not given human faces. As an avid non-fiction reader who is a lifelong lover of trains, I was pretty disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: Hyberbole aside
Review: Notwithstanding the constant hyberbole about this being the greatest feat of engineering in history (someone tell Ambrose about the Great Wall of China), I enjoyed this tale immensely and enjoyed too the style which the author used in telling the extraordinary details - both good and bad in building the Transcontinental Railroad. I was, however, somewhat dismayed with a statement found on page 292 (if memory serves) wherein Ambrose got his facts turned inside out in describing the fateful situation prior to the battle of Antietam when McClellan's troops found a copy of Lee's battle orders. He claimed it was Lee who found McClellan's orders and so, had an advantage in the coming engagement. I will give the benefit of the doubt to Mr. Ambrose and presume it was an editing error beyond his control - I hope. Unfortunately, it made me wonder about a few other "facts" stated in the book but I let the author's reputation soothe such concerns.
Rating: 
Summary: Heroic, totally engsrossing
Review: One of the great history sagas that I have ever read, and I have read alot of them. Ambrose is even better than my other favorite, Barbara Tuchman, about telling it how it is in the American history trenches. Without this great book the American public would have writen off one of the magnificent capitalistic, engineering, heroic mass labor miracles of the 19th Century. It's hard to believe what was accomplished even when one reads it. Wow!
Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: If you like to read Stephen Ambrose's books, you will enjoy this one. For all of you people who can't stand his very pro America stories then stay away. I thought this book was a good way to learn about a subject i knew little about and he made it fairly interesting to boot.
Rating: 
Summary: Failed to pass the test
Review: As a fan of Ambrose, and his great books such as Undaunted Courage, I was certainly disappointed in this one. The story was good, but a lot of facts and explanations were missing. The maps were elementary. Why wasn't there a time-line map shown? The map on page 343 belonged back in Chapter 7 or 9, probably the latter. He writes of so many places that never show up on any map. Lots of items/tools/equipment are never really explained. He indicated that some Confederates worked the line, but never indicated how they got along with the many Yankees. I liked the back and forth chapters which kept both the CP and the UP together time-wise, but many improvements could have been in this book. It isn't Ambrose's best by a long ways!
Rating:
Summary: God Bless America!
Review: Great story but disappointing delivery. I nearly disposed of the book after the first few chapters: too much "could only happen in the USofA" for me. However, after about 100 pages the story begins and it gets interesting, the politics, corruption and downright foul play to get the railroad built are nearly as fascinating as the imagery of the real heros, the men who surveyed, designed and built the thing.
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