When published in the late summer of 2000, Nothing Like It in the World was, like many of Ambrose's previous books, an immediate commercial success and quickly reached the "Number 1" position on the New York Times Best Seller List (Non-Fiction) on September 17, 2000.

[7] Several longer form papers and commentaries were also produced by well-known experts on the history of the Pacific Railroad which documented in detail that the book was rife with factual errors, misquotes, contradictions, demonstrably misleading and/or inaccurate statements, and unsupported conclusions.

The most extensive of those papers was first reported in a front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book[8] that listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in the book which were documented in the detailed December 2000, fact-checking study entitled "The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose" compiled by three longtime Western US railroad historians, researchers, consultants, and collectors who specialize in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.

[9][10][11] On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove reported in his column, "The Reliable Source", that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions.

Among academic reviewers, University of Notre Dame history professor Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins,[13] while Don L. Hofsommer of St.