The Rush

May 26, 2014
This headlong narrative from former Boston Globe science writer Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe) covers the tumultuous years from the discovery of gold in California to the gold bubble’s burst. Dubbed “a new history of the gold rush,” it’s new in its color and descriptive riches, all enlivened by the author’s prose. However, it doesn’t break any new ground, offer new explanations for the action-filled scenes Dolnick portrays, or change our view of the mad scramble for riches in California’s rivers. Dolnick tapped into the diaries and memoirs of men and women of the era to bring brilliantly alive the experiences of so many thousands (1% of the U.S. population) who left the East Coast, Europe, and even Asia in the search for freedom (often found, if only briefly) and wealth (mostly never found). He also emphasizes the great irony that many of those who grew rich during the gold rush did so not from the panned gold but from provisioning the miners and camp followers with their necessities. Dolnick’s compulsively readable story is one that’s rarely been told better.

July 15, 2014
The miners of the California GoldRush didn't need law and order, toothpaste or running water. They needed acourse in money management.In a bit of nicely rendered irony,Dolnick (The Clockwork Universe:Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World,2011, etc.) closes this spirited account of the Gold Rush with a fiscalreckoning: The average miner earned a whopping $20 per day-no small sum-at thestart of the rush in 1848, but only $6 per day toward the end in 1852. Whatthey made went through their fingers like water, but, writes the author, theyfound treasure of another kind in the freedom they enjoyed: "They had wokenevery morning in a shabby tent or a crude cabin and dreamed that they wouldfall asleep that night as rich as Croesus." The sentiment is a touch purple,given the damage the rush wrought on the landscapes of California and thepeople who lived among them. Nonetheless, Dolnick does a good job of locatingthe sentimental core of the rush and placing it in the context of its time-justa few years, he notes, after the word "millionaire" had been coinedto describe the "exotic creatures," no more than a dozen or so, who boasted thegreatest wealth the country had ever seen. The mere existence of the word wasenough to set dreamers' hearts to fluttering about becoming one of that dozenin the faraway fields of equally exotic California, a "half-unreal locale likeChina or Egypt." Dolnick draws on the best historiography and writes winninglyof the events in question, augmenting but not supplanting the many books thathave come before this one. Readers new to Gold Rush history willfind a bonanza here-and for old hands, Dolnick provides enough freshinterpretation to keep the pages turning.

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March 15, 2014
As the Edgar Award-winning author of "The Rescue Artist" and a former chief science writer at the "Boston Globe", Dolnick has intriguing credentials for writing this study of the Gold Rush, which tracks a cast of characters as they dream big, take the risky cross-country trek, and end up in cities gone wild. For everyone involved, it was a rags or riches story.

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