Holy crap that was a long book...

Remember when I said I was going to write about the books I'd read? I wrote my review of The Devil in the White City in a February entry. It isn't like I've been slacking since then. I started reading Stephen Ambrose's Nothing Like it in the World which was the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad. This was a book that was out of both mine at Dr. Ambrose's usual realm. We're both military historians who specialize in World War II. (Except he did the writing and I did the reading)

This book was an exercise in taking a break from writing about World War II for him. By his own admission, he wasn't used to writing without being able to interview the people who took part in what he was writing about. The transcontinental railroad was finished in 1869 so there aren't going to be very many people available for interviews. As a result there is less narrative-via-storytelling in this book. Ambrose relies on a narrative drawn from copious records stored in the archives of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. There are many of them: telegrams, letters to family and businessmen, cargo and shipping manifests, etc. But these aren't really recollections as much as they are lists and facts. With the exception of the personal letters to family, there are few diaries to draw information from. And it's a one-way street. You can't ask a letter home to expand on a comment made in passing. What was of little immediate importance in 1867 may be crucial to a larger puzzle in the 1990s when he was doing research for the book.

It wasn't an easy read for me because I'm not as familiar with the background material. When I'm reading about D-Day, I already know about the larger picture; I've read dozens of books about the war in Europe and I'm aware of how the planning occurred and how it related to the war in general. But with this story, I had embarrassingly little prior knowledge so I found myself having to go back and reread passages to understand them better and to go to other sources to allow me to put these events in context. It was more like studying for an exam than it was reading for pleasure. It was still fun. I know a LOT more about the labor history of the middle ninteenth century now and I know a lot more about the people from that time. Up to this point, my knowledge was limited in scope to the Civil War and a little bit of side reading about the broad cultural aspects of the period.

This book was widely criticized as being too one-sided and Ambrose was accused of plagarizing large passages of it. Someone of his stature and reputation cannot plagarize. His books are used as references for dozens of other books and any plagarism is going to be found quickly. In this case, I think there were probably examples of the same ideas found in other books being stated similarly. After all, there are only so many ways to convey an idea well. Sure, he could have quoted over and over, just to make sure but then the book becomes a string of quotations sewn together to make a new book. So I'm not at all behind the idea of his being a plagarizer. He was just too good an historian to do that.

I did enjoy this book but I don't know that I'd be able to get into this same period of history, at least this topic of this period of history, enough that I could fill in background myself. It's a really interesting era, no doubt about that, but it doesn't captivate me the same ways that other topics and historical eras do.