Empire Express Bain, David Haward

Nine weeks out of New York and bound for Macao, the leaky and over-burdened merchant barque Oscar struggled to round the Cape of Good Hope and was becalmed. Its captain cursed and swore at their slackened sails and abused his crew, while the vessel's sole passenger, a pious and sensitive man, tried to ignore a tirade made worse because it was the Lord's Day. (from the first line)

Beginning in 1842 with a visionary's dream to span the continent with twin bands of iron, Empire Express captures three dramatic decades in which the United States effectively doubled in size, fought three wars, and began to discover a new national identity. From self-made entrepreneurs such as the Union Pacific's Thomas Durant and the Central Pacific's Collis Huntington, to era-defining figures such as President Lincoln, Generals Grant and Sherman, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, to the thousands of nameless laborers -- especially the Irish and Chinese -- whose backbreaking work made the railroad possible, this extraordinary narrative summons an astonishing array of voices to give new dimension, not only to this monumental endeavor, but also to the culture, political struggles, and social conflicts of an unforgettable period in American history.

From the Publisher:
Describes the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad from Missouri to the Pacific in terms of the remarkable expansion of the United States of America.A dramatic history of the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad chronicles three seminal decades in American history, describing the vast enterprise to build a railroad from Missouri to the Pacific in terms of the remarkable expansion of the United States of America. Reprint.

Praise

San Francisco Chronicle
"EMPIRE EXPRESS, an extremely thorough history of the competition between the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroad companies, is rich with scandal, tragedy and visionary characters. In it, David Haward Bain brings alive a freer--that is, more ruthless--era of homegrown capitalism, when hardly anybody worried about little things like ecocide or conflict of interest." - Willaim T. Vollmann 11/04/1999

New York Times Book Review
"The building of the Pacific railroad is an epic story, often recounted but never so thoroughly, authoritatively and engagingly as in EMPIRE EXPRESS....[This book] is well researched, well written, refreshingly revisionist where the sources indicate, illustrated by well-chosen photographs and studded with beautiful topographical maps indispensible to the construction story. The book promises to endure as the standard history of the Pacific railroad." - Robert M. Utley 12/12/1999

Washington Post Book World
"...[this book] is an breathtaking tale enthusiastically told--of vision, greed, adventure, courage, betrayal, and accomplishment....EMPIRE EXPRESS is a spirited telling of a complicated tale." - H. W. Brands 12/12/1999

New Republic
"Bain has written by far the best account of the building of the Pacific railroad, as the nineteenth-century Americans called the first trancontinental railroad in the United States." 05/08/2000

Product Attributes

Book Format:		Paperback
Minimum Age:		18
Number of Pages:		0816
Publisher:		Penguin Books

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Empire Express Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (Paperback)

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