Nothing Like It in the World; The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1865-1869

New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 431, [1] pages. Maps. Endpaper maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index, DJ has slight wear and soiling. Signed by the author. Nothing Like It In the World is a narrative history of the planning and construction of the Pacific Railroad during the 1860s which connected the San Francisco Bay and Council Bluffs, Iowa by rail. When published in the late summer of 2000, Nothing Like It in the World was, like many of Ambrose's previous books, an immediate commercial success and quickly reached the "Number 1" position on the New York Times Best Seller List (Non-Fiction) on September 17, 2000. Although Ambrose was a retired University history professor, the book was written as a non-academic "popular history" aimed at a large general interest audience. Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 - October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many bestselling volumes of American popular history. In the wake of his death, a reviewer for the New York Times credited the historian with reaching "an important lay audience without endorsing its every prejudice or sacrificing the profession's standards of scholarship." Ambrose's earliest works concerned the Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation. Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. Ambrose wrote, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (1967). Ambrose was aided in the book's writing by comments and notes provided by Eisenhower, who read a draft of the book. In 1964 Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970) and a two-volume full biography, which are considered "the standard" on the subject. Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography is considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency. A visit to a reunion of Easy Company veterans in 1988 prompted Ambrose to collect their stories, turning them into Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest. D-Day was built upon additional oral histories, presented the battle from the view points of individual soldiers and became his first best seller. Citizen Soldiers became a best seller, appearing on the New York Times best sellers lists for both hardcover and paperback editions in the same week. During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also. He also wrote The Victors (1998), a distillation of material from other books detailing Eisenhower's wartime experiences and connections to the common soldier, and The Wild Blue, that looks at World War II aviation largely through the experiences of George McGovern, who commanded a B-24 crew that flew numerous missions over Germany. His other major works include Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks. In addition to twenty-seven self-authored books, Ambrose co-authored, edited, and contributed to many more and was a frequent contributor to magazines such as American Heritage.