The Old Iron Road: An Epic of Rails, Roads, and the Urge to Go West - Hardcover

Bain, David Haward

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670033081 ISBN 13: 9780670033089

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2004

Synopsis

The award-winning author of Empire Express describes his and his family's odyssey west as they retraced the entire route of the first transcontinental railroad, offering a fascinating glimpse of the American spirit of adventure, determination, and character that led to its construction, as well as the journeys that shaped both his own heritage and American history. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

David Haward Bain is the author of four previous works of nonfiction, including Empire Express and Sitting in Darkness, which received a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. His articles and essays have appeared in Smithsonian, American Heritage, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, and he reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and Newsday. He is a teacher at Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf WritersÂ’ Conference.

Reviews

Bain plumbed the history of America's West in Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad, and he elegantly broadens his scope here by logging 7,000 miles from his home in Vermont to California with a wife and daughter who'd never been to the West Coast and an eight-year-old son who'd never left the East Coast. Bain first takes them to the capacious Kansas City home where his grandparents lived, finding a "forgotten waste" (the house had been razed), a discovery illustrating one of Bain's themes: the curious interplay of past and present. He uses physical entities-museums, abandoned highways, the pioneers' still-discernible wagon wheel ruts-to swerve into historical forays that deftly and palpably engage. Bain lassoes the usual suspects-Calamity Jane, Butch Cassidy, Buffalo Bill Cody-but his prodigious research also reveals the stories of forgotten figures like Esther Hobart Morris, a Wyoming suffragist who was the first American woman to receive a civil appointment (as justice of the peace of South Pass City), and western writer Owen Wister, who helped establish the cowboy as an American archetype. Bain's main concern, however, isn't merely to foster a dialogue between the 19th-century Old West and its contemporary incarnation, but to fashion a literary travelogue. In that capacity, he's an intriguing guide (he eloquently describes the easy familiarity of the road by explaining why he doesn't let on to Bruce Hornsby that he knows who he is when their two families happen to meet). Bain bypasses a facile sentimentality for a more complex portrait of the American West. B&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

As a reward to his wife and children for their years of patience while he wrote Empire Express (1999), Bain takes them on a road trip out West, spending two months following early wagon trails, railroads, and highways. Showing them historical sites he's long studied, he hopes to create an "impressionistic narrative" of Indians and explorers, emigrants and railroaders, that portrays the transformation of the territory. But while he cites some strong literary forebears in this effort (William Least Heat Moon, John McPhee), Bain isn't quite able to make us share his feeling of becoming "unstuck in time." At each stop, he rushes headlong through a jumble of events, personalities, and descriptions, seemingly afraid to leave anything out. What's lost is a sense of space and perspective--something the landscape itself has in abundance. Railroad buffs and Western history fans will still find value here, but many readers will feel a bit like kids in the backseat, asking, "Are we there yet?" Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670033081
• ISBN 13: 9780670033089
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 464