![]() 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |