The Last Three Miles reads like the tale of suspense and intrigue that it is. Hart's style is engaging and rarely lags. In spite of all the drama, the underlying story of engineering and planning the skyway and the Impact it had on the future of American transportation systems is not neglected. This one gets high marks on all counts.

Steven Hart, a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Salon, has produced a first-rate piece of narrative history in The Last Three Miles . In doing so, Hart availed himself of a full spectrum of primary and secondary sources, including histories of labor, politics and the construction industry of the era, memoir literature, newspaper accounts, court records and family papers. ...

Hart's story is splendidly written, with nary a wasted word. His account of a massive construction project and its travails, framed by the tale of one of its major players, Frank Hague, revives the story of New Jersey's original "boss" for a new generation. Hart also provides the reader with a gripping account of one of the state's violent Depression era labor struggles and a noteworthy analysis of early highway engineering and construction, a science with one foot firmly planted in the nineteenth century and another tentatively feeling its way into the twentieth.