Truly a wonderful book...more like 2 or 3 books in one. It traces the early life of Funston..worthy of a book on its own but none out there that I can find. if you like the adventurous explorer scholarly type this is the man. Kind of a Richard Burton character...no silly... not the actor.Then it traces the history of the rebel movement at the turn of the century with the focus on Aguinaldo's movements in Northern Luzon. And finally it traces the author and his merry band as they retrace the steps of Funston in his bid to capture Aguinaldo in the early 1980's. So, in short if you are a student of history...READ IT!. If you like adventure or war stories...READIT! if you like drama...READ IT! If you know someone in the philippines...READ IT! I really had no idea of what happened over there or what role the usa had played over there. I don't think it was even mentioned in school. A real eye opener. Uhh, can you tell i liked it?

I used Empire Express as one of the sources for a research project that I had to do and I found it a mixed blessing. On the one hand, Empire Express is one of the most detailed books on the first transcontinental railroad of 1863-1869 that I have ever found. People, places, events, and ideas are all explained in crystal clear detail, leaving the reader with no ambuigities on how exactly the transcontinental railroad was constructed. Empire Express also includes a well-collected spread of primary source pictures in the middle, which is very helpful. Its information is invaluable if one needs true details.

However, reading this book was also slightly painful and got boring after a while. It is a really, really long and lengthy history tome and at times the author digresses into people or places that really have nothing to do with the transcontinental railroad. If you are looking for a simple overview of the construction of the railroad, turn away from this book; you'll give up before you ever get out of the book's opening 7 chapters on Asa Whitney the merchant and how he thought of the transcontinental railroad on his barge on the way to China and how it would improve Sino-American trade...Empire Express also is hard to navigate through when one is looking for specific information; the index sometimes is missing pages on specific topics.

It all boils down to whether you are able to read a lengthy historical tome and enjoy it as well or if you are put off by such long historical books; as for myself, I got halfway through and by that time I had finished with my project.

In "Empire Express" author David Haward Bain tells the story of the building of the transcontinental railroad, from the original evangelizing of the idea by Asa Whitney in the early 19th century to the Credit Mobilier scandal that engulfed Congress in the wake of the railroad's completion during the second Grant administration. In telling the story the author skillfully bridges fifty years of American history, from the agrarian, inward-looking communities of Jacksonian America to the dawn of American industrialism and expansion of the Gilded Age.

In tracing the evolution of the dream to build a transcontinental railroad from conception to completion in a single volume narrative history, Bain tackles a subject nearly as daunting as the original project itself. The cast of characters involved were many and diverse: Asa Whitney, Ted Judah, the "Big Four," the Ames brothers, Charles Durant, Grenville Dodge, several US presidents and cabinet officials, a slew of state and local leaders, not to mention the numerous mid-level railroad managers that actually turned the dream into reality. Weaving this wide array of participants and events into one seamless story is challenging, to say the least, but the author proves worthy of the task.

Bain is not a historian by training, but rather a former journalist currently serving as professor of literature at Middlebury College (VT). Thus, his writing has a certain literary quality and tends to eschew the bland prose common in more academic pieces, which could have made this book all but unbearable. However, it must be noted that the author isn't entirely successful in bringing order to the chaos. One can easily become confused as new players constantly emerge in the storyline while others quietly fade away. This cycle is repeated often, leaving the reader to thumb back to re-read certain sections again for clarity.

Finally, a modern American reader of "Empire Express" can't help but be shocked at the malfeasance attending the construction of the transcontinental railroad, not to mention the blatant conflict of interest prevalent throughout. For instance, Leland Stanford served as President of the Central Pacific and Governor of California simultaneously, pushing through legislation favorable to his company in the process. Meanwhile, the Union Pacific's Oakes Ames served as a US Congressional Representative with influence on federal railroad policy during construction of the road. Taken altogether, the present day pseudo-scandal surrounding Enron looks positively benign in comparison.

For those interested in railroads, the gilded age, or western history there is no better book from which to learn the chronology, the personalities, the politics and the geography of the first transcontinental railroad. It is a fascinating, albeit detailed, read. Within each chapter the author shifts the setting from east to west several times. While initially distracting, this device eventually serves to emphasize the intense competition between those rapacious entrepeneurs building the railroad from each direction. Two features lessen the enjoyment of reading this otherwise pleasurable tome. First, the repeated detailing of the financial devices and fiscal machinations used to fund the constructions of the railroad (and line the pockets of many movers and shakers) left this reader, and apparently others, confused. The author would have done well to insert a explanatory appendix of the welter of financial instruments used by the builders. This would have allowed the reader to make sense of these otherwise opaque sections. Second, those who have criticised the maps could not be more right. This book is about a venture in which geography is a central, even omnipresent, feature. For example, who but a Utah resident knows the precise location of the conjunction of Echo Canyon and Weber Canyon? The book speaks at length about these, and other important, but not well known, places, but the book's maps don't pinpoint them with any precision. I had to read the book with my large Rand McNally Atlas at hand. More maps, grade maps and colored maps all would have been welcome additions to this already very fine book.

Former Marine Louis Dorian Kahan raped, sodomized, and strangled seventeen year-old Vietnamese refugee Le My Hanh in Queens, New York, on April 15, 1977. Mr. Kahan called the police the next day, told them what he had done, and led them to the body. At trial, Mr. Kahan was found not guilty by reason of insanity and institutionalized. The psychiatrists for both the prosecution and the defense testified that although Mr. Kahan knew that he was raping and killing the victim, he did so while laboring under the delusion that he was back in Vietnam and using the standard operating procedure taught him by the Marine Corps for interrogating Viet Cong suspects. Clearly delusional, and clearly the correct verdict. The problem with "Aftershocks" is that Mr. Bain treats Mr. Kahan's fantastic ramblings as if they were true.

Mr. Kahan served in the Marine Corps as a cook, meaning that the only time he saw the bush was when he flew over it on his way from one giant base camp to another. He was a combat veteran in the loosest sense of the term-he served in secure areas of a war zone. Whatever delusions Mr. Kahan was prone to had their genesis well before his Vietnam service and his already shaky grip on reality was exacerbated by drug use. Mr. Bain gives credence to every one of the unfortunate Mr. Kahan's bizarre delusions, the strangest being that Mr. Kahan was detailed to strangle Viet Cong suspects on the orders of officers, followed closely by his fantasy that rape was routinely used to force suspects to "talk". Instead of taking these tales for what they are, the ravings of a madman, Mr. Bain says that "(t)he pattern cropped up in nearly every unit of the armed forces in Vietnam: systematic rape, looting, destruction of crops and dikes of questionable or no military significance, wanton killing of civilians". That bald statement is made without attribution. There are no footnotes in "Aftershocks" and Mr. Bain relies repeatedly on blind quotes and other stylistic tricks to lend an air of verisimilitude to the book. For example, while listing a parade of horribles allegedly committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam, Mr. Bain writes things like "... a man from Michigan" liked to rip the clothes from civilians, and "...a Marine from New Jersey" gave a Vietnamese child chocolate then set his hair on fire. No names, but the listing of states implies familiarity, implies truth.

"Aftershocks" is not poorly written. To the contrary, Mr. Bain has skillfully woven the parallel lives of killer and victim to create a compelling tale. Mr. Bain is a talented and serious writer, as his later works have shown. "Aftershocks", however, is a first book by a young man still imbued with the passions of his anti-war and anti-draft roots. It should not be read as history.