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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Redundant, wordy, sloppy, December 6, 1999
This review is from: All Aboard!: The Railroad in American Life (Hardcover)
It seems as if this book was slapped together in a week from the author's trivia catalog and then submitted to the publisher. There was no apparent editing of the manuscript evidenced by the sloppy punctuation, incomplete sentences and the horribly repetitious material. The two following sentences illustrate these three flaws and the trivial nature of the information presented throughout the book. Page 54 (hardcover) contains this sentence: "It was not unheard of that the station agent doubled in brass as the barber, postmaster, express agent, real estate dealer, seed salesman, druggist, florist, cemetery manager, even dentist."(sic) Then on page 274, this sentence appears: "In some communities, the agent doubled as postmaster, and it was not unknown for him to be the barber, the seed dealer, or even the dentist." Finally, the author makes a factual error about recent history which calls into question the accuracy of the rest of the book. Near the merciful end on page 393, the author comments that "... the airline industry ... had become 'deregulated' under the very same Reagan administration." In fact, the U.S. airline industry was deregulated in 1978 during the Carter administration. Pretty basic stuff. The book reminds me of many a term paper written in college - loads of fluff, not much substance and sloppy. After reading that the author is a professor of English, I couldn't help thinking what grade he would give his own book. If you buy one book about trains in your lifetime, make sure it is NOT this book.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent but superficial, December 29, 1995
By A Customer
The framework of this book attempts to relate the railroad to
American life, but provides very few specific insights. Changes
such as standard time, commuting, etc. are minimally covered.
As a general railroad history, it is superficial. Essentially it tries
to cover too much, and it is not tightly written. A fast reader or
one cursed with a good memory will see constant repitition of
minor interesting points in several chapters, making the book feel
padded. I'd pass on this one
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Slow Train to Nowhere, November 5, 2006
ALL ABOARD! was a gift to me from a fellow volunteer at our local historical museum, and he himself had received it as a gift from the first owner, the late Klink Garrett, former official of the Railway Express Agency and co-author of Ten Turtles to Tucumcari, a fascinating account of his wide-ranging experiences with the REA. With this history behind the copy I was given, I was determined to read it, and, after three months, I have. Unfortunately, that time span is very indicative of the readability of the text and of the level of interest it engenders in the reader.
Another reviewer in this forum has already castigated Douglas for the grammatical errors in the book, and I must agree with that reviewer to an extent. The first hundred or so pages are indeed replete with egregious misspellings, creating words that are totally and nonsensically out of place. These errors, which are indeed distracting to any careful reader, appear to be the result of Douglas' having employed a poor typist and the absence of competent proofreading. However, the author must have engaged a more competent typist or at least a more professional proofreader, for these errors thankfully diminish and recur only occasionally in the following 300 pages. Still, I must admit that, only three pages from the end of the narrative, the well-known and widely published railroad author Lucius Beebe appears as "Beebee."
These typographical errors aside, Douglas' writing lacks imagination. While it may be too harsh to describe his style as plodding, neither is it creative or scintillating. "Lackluster" is perhaps the most accurate descriptor of the author's vocabulary and sentence structure. When I wrote that I was determined to read the book, my own word choice may have been influenced by the fact that finishing all 399 pages of narrative did require determination.
The book does enjoy its strong points, however. Too many published railroad histories are hopelessly mired in a plethora of minutiae: dollar amounts of loans and company indebtedness down to the actual cent, miles of track constructed in each year down to the tenth of a mile, names of every unknown functionary who ever sat on a governing board, and so on. Douglas' book never enters that trap, focusing as it does on the broader influences that the railroad has exerted on culture, society and mind set in the United States.
The writer paints the railroad history of this country with a fairly broad brush, yet, in so doing, does present some surprising revelations, such as the fact that suburbia began as a result of the availability of rail transport and was not a child solely of the automobile as I had supposed. Similarly, Douglas explains that the origins of the very word "commuter" lie with the railroad, which reduced, or "commuted," the cost of tickets for frequent riders. I find that facts such as these go far in redeeming the book from its other flaws, and I cannot totally condemn any book from which I have learned something new, despite its other shortcomings.
Ironically, though, it may be the extensive bibliography in this book that argues most strongly against it. So much has been written about the history of railroading that one is forced to ask whether yet another book on the same subject is really justified. To enter such a competitive field successfully, an author must produce a genuinely outstanding work, the result of research that has uncovered new insights into the subject and which is expressed in captivating prose. Douglas' book, unfortunately, falls short of both criteria. In fact, its greatest contribution may be its bibliography, which can guide the inquiring reader to other and more satisfying books on the continuing saga of the railroad.
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