Terry Pindell's adventures along the way, personal reactions to people and landscape, are interspersed with stories from Canadian history, most of the latter connected with the building of the railways themselves. Pindell, author of an earlier book about American railways, set out to read Canadian history at the same time as he rode our trains from coast to coast. Pindell is riding the observation car when he describes the run from Golden over the Selkirk Range and the climb over Kicking Horse Pass - a section especially meaningful to me. Riding the freights in 1936 at age 17, I was kicked off the train by a railway cop at Golden, and had to walk 38 miles to Field, B.C. Hungry and tired, I found a piece of buttered bread along the tracks, thrown away by a passenger in the observation car. It tasted delicious. Pindell's is a fairly interesting narrative, especially at a time when the past seems the only anchor we have in the present. However, this book abounds with errors. For example, on Page 53, there are three mistakes in spelling the names of historical personages John Palliser, Henry Youle Hind and Sandford Fleming. Even John A. Macdonald's monicker gets mangled. It doesn't surprise me that an American writer would misspell a few Canadian names, which might escape his American publishers' notice. But surely the Canadian Douglas & McIntyre should have caught errors in such words as Doukhobor and Maclean's.