Compulsively readable ... Complicates the familiar account of hopeful panners and canny outfitters, pairing the romance with the reality and drawing more characters into the story ... Philbrick is a richly talented raconteur and a master of the cinematic vignette ... Traces a somewhat meandering thread from the gold in the foothills to Leland Stanford ... Intriguing rather than fully convincing, the case might have been made stronger with more analysis and argument than Philbrick’s light authorial touch tends to allow.
Sumptuous ... Beautifully portrayed ... There’s an echo of Mark Twain in the book’s cadences ... Conjures time and place in lush detail ... Philbrick has written an engrossing account of tensions at the heart of our republic.
A sprawling book, characters and stories spilling out everywhere, as dense with claims as the goldfields it describes ... The Rush is not particularly convincing ... He is fond of characters and good at depicting them, and he does not so much trace the influence of the gold rush on the Civil War as introduce us to various people with a stake in its outcome ... Ultimately more hamstrung by what it contains than by what it does not ... Philbrick has a keen eye and a magpie curiosity, and he can’t stop finding fascinating tidbits to share ... All this is fun to read, since Philbrick is an adept and congenial storyteller. But well told is not the same as telling, and, in the end, the overarching claims in his book are occluded rather than revealed by the surfeit of detail.
A panoramic look at the California gold rush ... Vivid and noteworthy ... The book ends deftly, tracing a throughline from the free-wheeling prospectors and their world to today’s tech bros.
As ever, Philbrick untangles this complex story and makes of it an elegant narrative ... A lucid, lively melding of economic and political history that casts new light on the Golden State.
