Book Review: The Race Underground

The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway
Doug Most
History, engineering

I expected to like this book. It has trains, engineering, urban design, history, and a city I'm familiar with. And I did like it. I'd have liked to have liked it more, though.

My problem with The Race Underground is that it reads as though it was written in haste and never received the attention of a first-rate editor. For one thing, the prose is often distinctly middle-schoolish:

"Dling, dling, dling," the bell rang out, and the car pulled away again.

For another thing, there's too much information that's badly presented, ill-phrased, eyebrow-raising, or just plain wrong. None of it is essential information, but there's enough of it to make me uneasy. For example:

• Springfield is not "an hour west of Boston," even today--much less in 1826. (Google gives the distance as 90.9 miles.)
• On page 302, workers are getting paid $2 for an eight-hour day. Four pages later, these same workers at the same time are getting paid $2 for a ten-hour day.
• Most thanks "Several living ancestors of Henry Whitney". This is quite a trick, since Whitney was born in 1836.

There's more, but you get the picture.

So much for the bad. On the plus side, Most has an interesting story to tell--even if it's not nearly as dramatic as the subtitle would suggest--and he tells it at a nice quick pace. The characters are deftly sketched out, their interactions are clear, and it's always easy to tell who's who (this last being an underappreciated feat). It's especially interesting to see the variety of attitudes that 19th-century people had toward the very idea of a subway. It's equally interesting, if mildly depressing, to note that it was no easier to get essential transportation works done then than it is now.

Most importantly, by choosing the two Whitney brothers as the poles of his book, Most gives his narrative a shape and a structure. I'm big on structure, in which I'm in excellent company. I wish Doug Most had given his book another once-over--or that he'd had a really good editor. But the first and most important task for a non-fiction author is to get the reader to want to turn the next page. I'll forgive a lot for that.

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The ne plus ultra of this sub-subgenre is David McCullough's The Great Bridge. Also worth mentioning is Jill Jonnes's Conquering Gotham--twenty years later, crossing the other Manhattan river, and going under rather than over, but very much related.