SOURCE: “Linking a Nation: Stephen Ambrose's Story of the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad,” in Chicago Tribune Books, September 3, 2000, p. 5.

In the following review, Weinberg offers favorable assessment of Nothing Like It in the World.

When I was young, the building of the interstate highway system transformed the U.S. The obstacles were huge, but road crews working heavy machinery got the job done. The time spent driving between major cities was cut in half.

Amazing as the building of the interstate highway system was, something far more amazing had occurred a century earlier—the building of a transcontinental railroad, with no heavy machinery to do the heavy lifting. How tens of thousands of laborers managed to build a serviceable railroad across rivers, through mountains and into deserts with little more than shovels, axes and dynamite boggles the mind.

Stephen Ambrose's new book makes the how of it...