The Rush: America's Fevered Quest for Fortune, 1848-1853

by Edward Dolnick Narrated by Bernard Setaro Clark

Overview

A riveting portrait of the Gold Rush, by the award-winning author of Down the Great Unknown and The Forger's Spell.

In the spring of 1848, rumors began to spread that gold had been discovered in a remote spot in the Sacramento Valley. A year later, newspaper headlines declared "Gold Fever!" as hundreds of thousands of men and women borrowed money, quit their jobs, and allowed themselves- for the first time ever-to imagine a future of ease and splendor. In The Rush, Edward Dolnick brilliantly recounts their treacherous westward journeys by wagon and on foot, and takes us to the frenzied gold fields and the rowdy cities that sprang from nothing to jam-packed chaos. With an enthralling cast of characters and scenes of unimaginable wealth and desperate ruin, The Rush is a fascinating-and rollicking-account of the greatest treasure hunt the world has ever seen.

Editorial Reviews

OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile

"There was gold..." There’s something tantalizing in Bernard Setaro Clark's narration, which contrasts the poverty and stillness of everyday life around 1849 with the rush to claim California's potential riches. The author provides much to digest—from mining techniques to Karl Marx's reaction to the gold discovery—and first-person anecdotes make the story come alive. The gentle last words on a grave marker, the determination of a starving traveler, and the dazzle of gold will touch listeners. The approach is personal but not sensational—descriptions of boom-town violence are low-key. With the author continually reminding listeners of the more recent Internet boom, this is a timeless and timely story. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

The New York Times Book Review - Walter R. Borneman

…Dolnick skillfully peppers his account with dozens of first-person quotations and experiences, though his focus is on the hopes, journeys and realities of five varied but engaging individuals…"Here was a society," Dolnick writes of life in the mining camps, "that was cosmopolitan, rowdy, violent, brand-new, thrilled with itself when it was not horrified, exploding in size, knee-deep in wealth, with no entrenched leadership class but instead a churning, changing hierarchy based on fortunes newly made and newly lost." Such words resound as an articulate reprise of the historian Rodman W. Paul's landmark Mining Frontiers of the Far West, 1848-1880, but Dolnick has also succeeded admirably in putting a decidedly personal face on these general characteristics and in the process he has produced a highly readable and graphic account of an episode that changed America.

Publishers Weekly

05/26/2014
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. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

PRAISE FOR THE FORGER'S SPELL:
"A gripping historical narrative...Dolnick, a veteran science writer, knows his way around a canvas...The Forger's Spell has raised provocative questions about the nature of art and the psychology of deception."—Washington Post Book World

"Dolnick brilliantly re-creates the circumstances that made possible one of the most audacious frauds of the 20th century. And in doing so Dolnick plumbs the nature of fraud itself...an incomparable page turner."—Boston Globe

"[Dolnick] tells his story engagingly and with a light touch. He has a novelist's talent for characterization, and he raises fascinating questions."—New York Times Book Review

"The Forger's Spell is an excellent read, a swift and astute narrative written from many complex perspectives to great effect."—Chicago Sun-Times

"Pacing and prose as gripping as those of the best mystery novelist...The Forger's Spell is simply spellbinding."—Philadelphia Inquirer

"An engaging and highly amusing account of a clever craftsman. . . . On all those levels this is a delightful foray into art history and psychology"—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Washington Post Book World

PRAISE FOR THE FORGER'S SPELL:
"A gripping historical narrative...Dolnick, a veteran science writer, knows his way around a canvas...The Forger's Spell has raised provocative questions about the nature of art and the psychology of deception."

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"An engaging and highly amusing account of a clever craftsman. . . . On all those levels this is a delightful foray into art history and psychology"

New York Times Book Review

"[Dolnick] tells his story engagingly and with a light touch. He has a novelist's talent for characterization, and he raises fascinating questions."

Boston Globe

"Dolnick brilliantly re-creates the circumstances that made possible one of the most audacious frauds of the 20th century. And in doing so Dolnick plumbs the nature of fraud itself...an incomparable page turner."

Chicago Sun-Times

"The Forger's Spell is an excellent read, a swift and astute narrative written from many complex perspectives to great effect."

Philadelphia Inquirer

"Pacing and prose as gripping as those of the best mystery novelist...The Forger's Spell is simply spellbinding."

OCTOBER 2014 - AudioFile

"There was gold..." There’s something tantalizing in Bernard Setaro Clark's narration, which contrasts the poverty and stillness of everyday life around 1849 with the rush to claim California's potential riches. The author provides much to digest—from mining techniques to Karl Marx's reaction to the gold discovery—and first-person anecdotes make the story come alive. The gentle last words on a grave marker, the determination of a starving traveler, and the dazzle of gold will touch listeners. The approach is personal but not sensational—descriptions of boom-town violence are low-key. With the author continually reminding listeners of the more recent Internet boom, this is a timeless and timely story. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2014-07-03
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170033881
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	08/12/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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