Word: railroads
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...NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD: Veteran historian Stephen Ambrose writes at full throttle about the construction of the transcontinental railroad during the 1860s. This magnificent tale of high finance, low finagling and workers hacking through 2,000 miles is magnificently told...
...Ronnie had a weird natural vibrato - almost a tremolo, really - that modulated her little-girl timbre into something that penetrated the Wall of Sound like a nail gun. It is an uncanny instrument. Sitting on a ragged couch in my railroad flat, I could hear her through all the arguments on the street, the car alarms, the sirens. She floated above the sound of New York while also being a part of it - a Bronx-born Latina stomping her foot on the sidewalk and insisting on being heard...
...haunting watercolor: children dressed in red and blue appear on a playground, fenced off from the adults in the black and gray street who have been reduced to figures out of Munch's "Scream"-both elongated and hunched with hollow eyes. Shortly after the burial of her father, a railroad clerk, Neel painted "Dead Father" (1946): a gentle-looking man, slightly too stiff to be asleep, lies in the bed of his coffin...
...poets alike, differs markedly from a subject like World War II, with its clear consensus about good and evil. Ambrose's latest saga is not a historical blame game played by today's rules. Still, the author has more respect for the past than to pretend that the transcontinental railroad could have been built without financial corruption, treacherous working conditions, the blood and sweat of scoundrels and bigots, and the killing of Indians who fought the iron horsemen because their rails altered bison-migration patterns...
Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (Simon & Schuster; 431 pages; $28) is Stephen E. Ambrose's account of the visionaries who planned, financed and finagled the project, and the thousands of Civil War veterans and new immigrants who laid the tracks...