Last Train to Paradise: Henry Flagler and the Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Railroad that Crossed an Ocean

by Les Standiford Narrated by Del Roy

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

bn.com

The Barnes & Noble Review
This riveting biography of Henry Flagler, the driven oilman who helped establish Florida as a vacation destination, reads like a Raise the Titanic for the railroad set. Flagler, who dreamed of building a railway that would connect Key West to the Florida mainland, was a determined entrepreneur whose dream would, ultimately, be obliterated by forces he never imagined.

Flagler made his fortune as co-founder of Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller. When he retired, he dedicated himself to a dream: creating access to Florida's Gold Coast. He built a string of resorts, from Jacksonville to Key West. The centerpiece was the Florida East Coast Railway, running over open ocean for an incredible 156 miles from Miami to Key West. When it was completed and operational in 1913, Miami was an immediate benefactor and soon became both a destination and a point of departure for the Keys (and, further south, Havana). The Railway stood until 1935, when the worst hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland ripped many of the bridges from their anchors, destroying Flagler's quixotic dream.

Last Train to Paradise is a compelling mix of suspense, heroism, and determination, written by an author with a deft touch. Get on board! Elena Simon

The story of the crazy idea to build a railroad over open ocean in the Florida Keys, its completion, and its complete destruction 22 years later in a hurricane is well told by author and Florida resident Standiford. Though the central protagonist is the oil tycoon Henry Flagler, who was a pivotal figure in the development of Florida's coast, Standiford never loses sight of the experience of the railroad's less well-known engineers and workers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Booknews

The story of the crazy idea to build a railroad over open ocean in the Florida Keys, its completion, and its complete destruction 22 years later in a hurricane is well told by author and Florida resident Standiford. Though the central protagonist is the oil tycoon Henry Flagler, who was a pivotal figure in the development of Florida's coast, Standiford never loses sight of the experience of the railroad's less well-known engineers and workers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

A History Lite tale chronicles the building, between 1892 and 1912, of the 156-mile railroad from Miami to Key West, once billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. As he readily acknowledges, Florida resident and novelist Standiford (Bone Key, p. 296, etc.) owes much to those professional historians who dug out the details of the remarkable story he swiftly and ably summarizes. He begins at the end: Labor Day, 1935, when a massive hurricane struck the Keys, an event exhaustively detailed in William Drye's Storm of the Century (above). Among those scurrying around trying to protect life and property were Ernest Hemingway, whose house and boat suffered minor damage, and Bertrand Russell, who lost family members and very nearly died himself. Just as a 20-foot tidal wave hits a train, the author whisks us away to the year 1904. Henry Flagler, a trusted associate of John D. Rockefeller and an extremely wealthy man himself, courtesy of Standard Oil, has decided to develop Florida. Standiford fleshes out Flagler's remarkable career as hotel-builder and resort-developer, portraying him as an innovative entrepreneur with an unflagging faith in himself and in his structural engineers. Although the press characterized the projected railroad across swamp and sea as "Flagler's Folly," he never doubted it would one day exist and turn a tidy profit. He was right about the former, wrong about the latter. Standiford does an admirable job of keeping the story afloat as the project is plagued by hurricane, mosquitoes, and vast cost overruns, and he has an eye for the memorable detail (e.g., each morning, alligators had to be shooed away from the construction equipment), as well as a weakness for clichés. Atthe end, he returns readers to his exciting account of the 1935 hurricane that destroyed much of the roadbed and exiled the railroad to history. Engaging, but facile. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen) Author tour

From the Publisher

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 rousing—a deeply sobering—story 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

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172165030
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/13/2002
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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 the annual coterie of friends and hangers-on from the North--arrived to lure him from his work on fishing expeditions out to the nearby Gulf Stream or Dry Tortugas, or to an endless round of parties there on land.

Earlier that summer he had turned in a completed manuscript of The Green Hills of Africa, which he privately considered his best writing since Death in the Afternoon. With publication scheduled in October, Hemingway was eager to see if the public's approbation matched his own. Though he'd had similar hopes for the bullfighting book when it was published in 1932 and had been disappointed by the decidedly mixed opinion of the critics, he was certain he would receive his due this time.

He'd received a nice little bonus in the form of a five- thousand-dollar sale to Scribner's for the magazine serialization of Death in the Afternoon, things were going well between him and his second wife, Pauline, and he was intrigued with his current project in To Have and Have Not, where he intended to bring fictive life to all the Key West lore and legend that he had accumulated since moving to the island city in 1928.

Not a bad moment, then, not by any...

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