This is a first - a thorough and carefully researched history of the gold rushes in New Zealand - and it establishes a benchmark for future work on the history of the gold rushes. It's based on sound scholarship and aimed at the wide and growing general readership of those keen to know more about, and to weigh up, the history of New Zealand. The style is clear, clean and lively. The scope is the social history of the goldfields of colonial New Zealand, from the 1850s to the 1870s. The book opens with a survey of worldwide rushes in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, when for the first time in history a great wheeling movement of gold diggers began to revolve from continent to continent. The main body of the book looks at all the rushes, large and small, that took place in the colony: Coromandel, Golden Bay, Otago, Marlborough, the West Coast and Thames. The early chapters of the main body survey rushes chronologically; the later chapters look at rushes thematically. Beautifully illustrated with sketches and watercolours of the times, this is both a wonderful read and a beautiful gift book.