![]() ![]() And Ambrose tells a good story, describing the job of building America's grand iron highway as a nip-and-tuck race between the Central Pacific (CP) in the West and the Union Pacific (UP) in the East. ![]() His latest hit, "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869," is, like most of Ambrose's work, primarily an exercise in storytelling. ![]() His bibliography includes works with titles ("Stephen Ambrose Collection" and "The Best of Stephen Ambrose") typically reserved for aging rock stars. Ambrose has written on Eisenhower and Nixon, D-Day and Lewis and Clark. He is popular, prolific and patriotic, and his writing tends inexorably toward the grandiose. Ambrose is a historian in the Whitmanian vein. That's because the inspiration behind the poem was an American event: the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. It lingers instead on the Sierra Nevada and the plains of the Midwest. Walt Whitman's poem "Passage to India" is supposedly about the union of America and Asia, but it never quite reaches the Ganges. ![]()
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