Volume 48, Number 14 · September 20, 2001
Continental Choo-Choo
By William H. McNeill
Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad
by David Haward Bain
Penguin, 797 pp., $18.00 (paper)
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869
by Stephen E. Ambrose
Simon and Schuster, 431 pp., $28.00
The two eminently readable histories by David Bain and Stephen Ambrose treat the same subject, the history of America's first transcontinental railroad, and were published only a year apart, yet the authors' paths apparently never crossed—or, if they did, each chose to ignore the other. The fourteen years that Bain spent reading original sources, finding 'refutations of myths passed down for generations,' and then writing his book clearly exceeded the effort Ambrose put into his. Some of Ambrose's footnotes refer to the same archives that Bain used so strenuously; but they are relatively few.
Review, 3795 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |