“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”
OMFG! How did Stanley get out of high school writin' incoherent, empty, posturing drivel like that?! That this got published is truly a crime against nature, as in the unjustified killin' of trees...