دانلود کتاب The Impossible Railway: The Building of the Canadian Pacific

IN 1871, a tiny nation-just four years old, its population well below the four million mark-deterinined that it would build the world 's longest and costliest railroad across 2500 miles of empty and forbidding country, much of it unexplored, most of it unpopulated. This decision, bold to the point of recklessness, was to alter the future and the shape of the nation and to change the lives of every Canadian then and for a century to come.
For fourteen years - from the dispatch of the first survey parties into the wilderness above Lake Superior and high into the unknown peaks of the Canadian Rockies until the driving of the last spike at Craigellachie on the western slope of Glacier National Park in 1885-the struggle to build the Canadian Pacific Raihvay fascinated, convulsed, consumed, threatened, and finally unified the entire young nation.
During these turbulent years, Canadians and many Americans-of every stripe fought for the railway or against it. Their tale is crammed with human drama beyond the reach of fiction: financial scandal and double-dealing that threatened the Government in Ottawa and shook the money markets in New York and London, land speculation and swindles that brought boom and bust to prairie villages, an alcoholic Prime Minister able to dominate an unruly parliament, armed rebellion in Manitoba, the development of the North West Mounted Police, surveyors wintering in fifty-foot snowdrifts, prostitutes, gamblers, and bootleggers carousing in the construction camps, while thousands of Chinese laborers toiled - and often died - to force a right of way through the majestic but unyielding country of the North West. Until, ultimately, the almost incredible feat of flinging 2500 miles of steel across a continent in less than five years was accomplished.
Pierre Berton's magnificent reconstruction of this heroic saga, based on unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and letters, as well as on public documents, newspapers of the time, and ot her primary sources, is an important contribution to history as weil as a book that will bring to life for every reader a great adventure and the all-too human figures who lived it.

PIERRE BERTON is Canada's premier journalist, at home in all media-magazines, newspapers, books, and television . He is also the country's best-selling author, with an unprecedented trio of Governor General's Awards ( equivalent to the U. S. Pulitzer Prize) to his credit. His history of the Gold Rush, The Klondike Fever, is considered the definitive ,vork on that subject, and the National Film Board documentary City of Gold, which he wrote and narrated, has won sorne forty international awards, including the Grand Prix at Cannes. Mr. Berton also holds two National Newspaper awards and the Stephen Leacock medal for humor. He is the father of seven children and lives with his family in Kleinburg, Ontario, not far from Toronto.