ISBN: Ostalo
Godina izdanja: 0000
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

U dobrom stanju

The National Dream
Pierre Berton

Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart; First Edition (1970)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover 439 pp.
Decorated endpapers, bibliography, index, maps.
(Canada, Canadian Pacific Railway, Railway Companies--Canada).

In 1871, a tiny nation, just four years old-its population well below the four million mark-determined that it would build the world`s longest and costliest railroad across empty country, much of it unexplored. This decision—bold to the point of recklessness—was to change the lives of every man, woman and child in Canada and alter the future and the shape of the nation. Its effects are still being felt a century later.

Using primary sources-diaries, letters, unpublished manuscripts, public documents and newspapers—Pierre Berton has reconstructed the incredible decade of the 1870s, when Canadians of every stripe-contractors, politicians, financiers, surveyors, workingmen, journalists and entrepreneurs-fought for the railway, or against it.

It is a tale crammed with human drama. Here is the fullest account ever published of the Pacific Scandal, which left its scars upon the era. Here, told for the first time, is the saga of the surveyors who struggled and often died in the mountains and of the construction men who fought to tame the muskegs and the granites of the Canadian Shield. Here is the unpublished story of how railroad contracts were awarded to political cronies—men who thought little of bribing public servants to get what they wanted.

Above all, THE NATIONAL DREAM is the story of people, all of them larger than life. It is the story of the great political figures of the era—Macdonald, Tupper, Mackenzie and Blake. It is the story of George McMullen, the brash, young promoter who tried to blackmail the Prime Minister of Canada, of Marcus Smith, the crusty surveyor, so suspicious of authority he thought the Governor General was speculating in railway lands, of Sanford Fleming, the great engineer who invented Standard Time, but couldn’t make up his mind about the railroad’s route, of Donald Smith, one-eyed Jim Hill and George Stephen, who turned a broken-down railroad in Minnesota into a multi-million dollar enterprise. All these figures, and dozens more, come to life as flesh and blood figures, with human failings, human ambitions and human foibles.

THE NATIONAL DREAM reads like a novel but every word of it is documented. Never before has this story of Canada’s beginnings been told in such detail and with such zest. An important contribution to history, it can be read with equal pleasure by layman or academic. And after reading it, none can ever say again that the story of this country’s past is dull.

A second volume, THE LAST SPIKE, is planned for the autumn of 1971.

Pierre Berton is Canada’s best-known journalist. At home in all media, he works continually in television, radio and on the printed page. The author of seventeen books, he has also written for the stage and the screen. He is the father of seven children and lives at Kleinburg, Ontario, some twenty-five miles northwest of Toronto.
WITH NINE MAPS

******

Pierre Francis de Marigny Berton, CC, O.Ont. (July 12, 1920 – November 30, 2004) was a Canadian historian, writer, journalist and broadcaster. Berton wrote 50 best-selling books, mainly about Canadiana, Canadian history and popular culture. He also wrote critiques of mainstream religion, anthologies, children`s books and historical works for youth. He was a reporter and war correspondent, an editor at Maclean`s Magazine and The Toronto Star and, for 39 years, a guest on Front Page Challenge. He was a founder of the Writers` Trust of Canada, and won many honours and awards.

Berton came to be Canada`s best-known intellectual. His biographer, Brian McKillop wrote: `No one in Canada or for that matter in North America, managed to take hold of the full range of the mainstream media with the same kind of commanding presence and authority. One searches in vain for an American or British equivalent. It is if he somehow carried the DNA of Edward R. Murrow and Jack Paar, Vance Packard and Michael Harrington, Bernard DeVoto and Studs Terkel, with more than a little Garrison Keillor in the mix. Each of these figures—a war correspondent who spoke truth to power; a host of the most watched and enduring television interview program of its era; a muckraking journalist in the age of the consumer; a left-wing critic of North American society; a popular and respected historian of nation and empire in North America; a collector of the kind of folklore that serves as the first draft of history; a folksy, story-telling humorist of nostalgic bent—was or is a man of exceptional accomplishment in his own area. The magnitude of Berton`s achievement was that he spanned them all and become more than their sum`.

In 1970, book one of Berton`s epic about the building of the CPR, The National Dream was published, becoming a great critical and commercial success by 1971. Book two of the series, The Last Spike, was published in 1971 and was even more successful with the public. The success of The Last Spike transformed Berton into a sort of `national institution` as he become the popular story-teller historian that he set out to be. Such was the popularity of The Last Spike that in 1972 that stores sold mementoes related to the book, which was most unusual for a history book.] In a review, the American historian Ralph Hidy wrote that Berton`s railroad saga was an `essentially sound` history that was relatively free of errors. Hidy stated that though Berton broke no new ground in his railroad saga, his work was very `lively` and carried `the reader through one cliff-hanging situation after another`. The sections dealing with the building of the Rocky mountains section of the CPR are generally considered to be the vivid and exciting part of Berton`s railroad epic. Berton described how the railroad builders had to quite literally blast and hack their way through the sheer granite of the Rocky mountains, which was an extremely difficult, dangerous and arduous task, given the technology of the time. Hidy wrote that as a work of narrative popular history, Berton succeeded admirably in telling the story of the construction of the CPR over daunting odds, and in impressing the reader as to why the building of the CPR, which was completed five years ahead of schedule, was considered one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century.