Appetite for America, by Stephen Fried

The subtitle of this book is “How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West”. While I had heard of Fred Harvey, and about the “Harvey Girl” movie starring Judy Garland, I didn’t realize the impact these restaurants had on the country. The person Fred Harvey was an Englishman Read More

The Ghost of Gold Mountain, by Gordon H Chang

This book is about the unnamed Chinese immigrants who helped build the western part of the Transcontinental Railroad. While their achievements were praised at the time, their names and histories have been, for the most part, lost to time. Chang’s book is an attempt to recover some of that history. In the mid-1800’s, the Central Read More