“California’s big, storied past gets a nuanced, superbly researched retelling in one volume… Hiltzik also excels at creating subtle, almost invisible master narratives.” — Los Angeles Times
“Michael Hiltzik’s Golden State is a monumental history of California brimming with fierce national implications for today. With astonishing detail and elegant prose, Hiltzik masterfully delineates Spain's brutal conquest of Indigenous peoples in the early sixteenth century; the 1848 Gold Rush; the railroad revolution; the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and so much more. His accounts of Hollywood, Big Agriculture, and Silicon Valley innovation are superb. Hiltzik makes a compelling case that California is the heartbeat of our nation.” — Douglas Brinkley, New York Times bestselling author of Silent Spring Revolution
“No other state than California has a history so large, so colorful, so full of hope, misery, and the unexpected. It is almost America in microcosm, and Michael Hiltzik tells its tale beautifully.” — Adam Hochschild, New York Times bestselling author of American Midnight
"Michael Hiltzik's Golden State: The Making of California turns the lens on the powerful global and national figures and personalities—familiar and hitherto unknown—that built the Golden State. Hiltzik moves crisply across borders, territories, and states to reveal California as a space where demanding visions were contested but often realized, through conflicting visions of power, water, land, people, and profit. Forceful personalities—from Junipero Serra to Walt Disney to Richard Nixon to Cesar Chavez—crossed cultural and political borders to build a state of their own, a place that sat upon a volcano of utopian social dreams and apocalyptic political tremors." — Jean Pfaelzer, author of California: A Slave State
"This engaging Pulitzer Prize-winner is perfectly placed to argue that there is something exceptional about this state. . . What Hiltzik does so well here though is get behind the mystical allure of the 'golden state.'" — The Guardian