After The Gold Rush £9.95 (ISBN: 0 85546 007 5)
In 1849 the United Sates saw the start of an extraordinary migration which lasted over a decade and involved several hundred thousand Europeans, Russian and Americans. Striking out across the old U.S. and the ‘Great American Desert’, their goal was the goal fields of California and their dream to strike it rich and return home within a year. None did, but the Gold Rush epitomized the American Dream and was a defining moment in the country’s short history.

Following the same historic roads and trails taken by argonauts 150 years earlier, this is John Stuart Clarks’s story of retracing that great adventure. More than a journey through history, After The Gold Rush is a chronicle of America and Americans he encountered at the turn of the twenty-first century, before 9- 11 transformed  the nation. Undertaken at a time when the worst tornado on record struck the mid-West, the worst school massacre shook the nation, and the worst case of a president caught with his flies open  was slobbered over, it is the tale of a 3,000 mile trek  across mountains and deserts, through ghettos and wilderness, against sandstorms, hurricanes and blazing heat.

And it is a journey undertaken on a nineteenth century vehicle - by bicycle, itself presenting problems which added a touch of absurd to the odyssey. Drawing under the pen name Brick, John is the UK’s leading development cartoonist and his sense of the ridiculous shines through the telling of this epic narrative.

 You can order a copy from the: The Richmond Publishing Co. Ltd, PO Box 963, Slough SL2 3RS, England. Tel: +44 (0)1753 643140 Fax: +44 (0) 1753 646553 E-mail: rpc@richmond.co.uk  Cheques should be payable to Richmond Publishing Co. Ltd.