Doug Most

Definitely enjoyable but a little broad and high-level. Almost reads like a Ragtime Ragtime or something, with an amazing cast of 19th century characters including engineers, sandhogs, financiers, and so on. Great material on early technological advances - Beach's pneumatic tube, Brunel's tunneling machines, Sprague's electric motors - but oddly little detail on the actual Boston and New York subways as built. Then again, it's less about those, and more about the process of getting them built, which was a heavy lift indeed.… (meer)

A deep dive into the start of subways in New York and Boston. Horse draw carriages, then horse drawn trolleys ruled the streets. The streets were jammed with these vehicles making it unsafe for pedestrians to cross the streets. There were so many that the streets were jammed. If the cities were to expand and grow, they needed safer and faster transportation.

London was first, but used steam engines, filling the platforms with soot. New York and Boston looked to the new power of electricity.… (meer)

In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew larger, the streets became increasingly clogged with horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 brought New York City to a halt, a solution had to be found. Two brothers—Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York City—pursued the dream of his city being the first American metropolis to have a subway and the great race was on. The competition between Boston and New York was played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, job losses, bitter political tensions, and the question of America's place in the world.… (meer)

I won this book in exchange for an honest review.

I unfortunately could not bring myself to finish this book.

I found several challenges with this book. Of what I have read, I have found this book to be fraught with convoluted chapters, a multitude of secondary characters who appear for no more than one chapter and absolutely no flow. The author will begin a chapter and I would find myself saying, what does this have to do with anything? In a way I can applaud Mr. Most's use of detailed historical information but I just felt it did not help the story move along.

I was more than half way into the book and had still not gained a sense of the 'rivalry' between the two Whitney brothers. I did not even think there was a rivalry between the two cities of New York and Boston. I felt as if the author imposed that opinion onto the reader.

An extremely tedious writing of a very interesting and unknown subject matter.… (meer)