Last Train to Paradise

Zusatztext A dramatic story . . . and Les Standiford has a good deal of fun with it all. Washington Post Book World A definitive account of the engineering feat that became known as 'Flagler's Folly'. . . A rousing adventure." Atlanta Journal-Constitution A fascinating and incredibly compelling account . . . I could not put it down. Donald Trump This is the remarkable true-life chronicle of one of America's greatest engineering achievements! and how it was all blown to bits in a few hellish hours. No novelist could have invented such a stunning tale! or such unforgettable characters. Carl Hiaasen! author of Basket Case Last Train to Paradise is a fast-moving and gripping story about one of the most ambitious and difficult engineering projects of the last century. Henry Petroski! author of Engineers of Dreams This is a wonderfully told tale! a strange and compelling story about a strange and compelling part of the world. With sharp! evocative reporting! the book captures an era! the Florida landscape! and the very human dream of doing the impossible. Susan Orlean! author of The Orchid Thief Last Train to Paradise is an extraordinary achievement! a nonfiction book as exciting and finely written as a first-rate novel! with the narrative drive of a locomotive. . . . Throw in Ernest Hemingway and some of the most dramatic scenes of the chaos of a hurricane ever written and you've got one hell of a spectacular book. James Hall! author of Blackwater Sound and Under Cover of Daylight Only one thing could have stopped entrepreneur Henry Flagler: the most powerful storm ever to strike the United States. Les Standiford has given us a rousinga deeply soberingstory of this 1935 collision between hubris and hurricane in the Florida Keys. Barbara Ehrenreich! author of Nickel and Dimed Last Train to Paradise is a mesmerizing account of Gilded Age titan Henry Flagler and his extraordinary dream to build a railroad across the sea. Henry Flagler's quest to build an overseas railroad has all the elements of a classic Greek tragedy! and Les Standiford has captured both the man and his times with pitch perfect grace. Connie May Fowler! author of Before Women Had Wings and When Katie Wakes Informationen zum Autor Les Standiford is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels as well as several works of nonfiction including Last Train to Paradise, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Meet You in Hell, and Washington Burning . He has received the Frank O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is founding director of the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and was appointed holder of the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. He lives in Pinecrest, Florida, with his wife and three children. Klappentext The fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad-one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores. In 1904, the brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler, partner to John D. Rockefeller, dreamed of a railway connecting the island of Key West to the Florida mainland, crossing a staggering 153 miles of open ocean-an engineering challenge beyond even that of the Panama Canal. Many considered the project impossible, but build it they did. The railroad stood as a magnificent achievement for more than twenty-two years, heralded as "the Eighth Wonder of the World," until its total destruction in 1935's deadly storm of the century. In Last Train to Paradise, Standi...

Autorentext
Les Standiford is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels as well as several works of nonfiction including Last Train to Paradise, The Man Who Invented Christmas, Meet You in Hell, and Washington Burning. He has received the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is founding director of the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami and was appointed holder of the Peter Meinke Chair in Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg. He lives in Pinecrest, Florida, with his wife and three children.

Klappentext
The fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad-one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores.

In 1904, the brilliant and driven entrepreneur Henry Flagler, partner to John D. Rockefeller, dreamed of a railway connecting the island of Key West to the Florida mainland, crossing a staggering 153 miles of open ocean-an engineering challenge beyond even that of the Panama Canal. Many considered the project impossible, but build it they did. The railroad stood as a magnificent achievement for more than twenty-two years, heralded as "the Eighth Wonder of the World," until its total destruction in 1935's deadly storm of the century.

In Last Train to Paradise, Standiford celebrates this crowning achievement of Gilded Age ambition, bringing to life a sweeping tale of the powerful forces of human ingenuity colliding with the even greater forces of nature's wrath.

Leseprobe
End of the Line

Key West

Labor Day Weekend, 1935

At about four o'clock in the afternoon on Labor Day Saturday in 1935, Ernest Hemingway, by then one of Key West's most notable residents, thought it time to knock off work on weaving together what an editor had called "those Harry Morgan stories," an undertaking that would eventually be published as a novel titled To Have and Have Not. He left his studio, went into the kitchen with its tall, built-to-Papa cabinet tops, to pour himself a drink, then walked out onto the spacious porch of the two-story home on Whitehead Street that he and his second wife, Pauline, had bought in 1931.

The day's work had been good. Now he intended to wind down and have a look at the evening paper.

The weather was typical for late summer in Key West: the temperature in the high eighties, the humidity about the same, but the skies were clear, and there was a sea breeze sweeping over the mile-wide island to soften the heat, especially in the shade of a broad front porch.

It was a new-found pleasure for Hemingway to indulge himself in such a simple fashion, even in his own home. The year before, a zealous Federal Emergency Relief Act administrator had published a pamphlet intended to boost tourism, listing Hemingway's home as among the top twenty-five attractions on the island of some twelve thousand souls.

Though Hemingway well understood the value of cultivating a certain mystique, it had nonetheless galled him to find himself, on the way to or from his workroom on the second floor of a then-unattached outbuilding, staring back at a queue of gawking visitors on the other side of the chain-link fence that protected his property. Thus, only a few days before, and after much wrangling with a city bureaucracy that considered it an eyesore, work had been completed on a stone wall that now marched about the three open sides of the house's corner lot, giving him some measure of privacy at last.

It is easy to imagine Hemingway in a reasonably affable mood that afternoon. "Now that I've gone private," he'd remarked to his longtime handyman, Toby Bruce, once the wall was up, "they might even take me off the tourist list."

And because it was the off-season, there would be no crowds in Sloppy Joe's Bar to annoy him during his late-night rounds. Nor had the "mob"--as he sometimes referred to th…

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