A history book to help you remember why you dreaded history class in the first place.

The building of the Transcontinental Railroad was the single most important feat of engineering in the 19th Century. It took the better part of 6 years to complete. It required countless lives, limbs, and treasure. It was the brainchild of the grandest swindlers of that or any era, men whose ill-gotten railroad wealth would later shame even the most extravagant Americans. Immigrants descended on the Western states from the world over to complete it, leaving behind a unified America, as well as the melting pot society we so cherish today. It is, after the Civil War, the

You will read very little of any of that here. Instead, we get excruciatingly pointless detail about each ravine filled, each trestle bridge constructed. Occasionally Brigham Young will pop in to ask for the money owed his Mormons for their hard work. Very little is depicted regarding the men who built the railroad, either the capitalists or the workaday grunts. We hear of occasional horrors, such as scores of Chinese buried alive in Sierra avalanches. But these are quickly swept aside, as the reader is treated to the presumably more important accounting of the great tunneling through that venerable mountain range. Nor can I can't say I know more of Stanford or Hopkins now than I did 400 pages ago. A shame.

Still, at least Ambrose is passionate about the subject, which makes the reading go far quicker than it has any right to go.