Book excerpt: Rezension 1: Felix Wierzbicki has been almost forgotten though he played an important part in the Westward Expansion of the United States. He fled from Poland and the Russian domination after being imprisioned as a young student. He was an aristocrat and well educated so on arriving in the U.S. he supported himself by teaching, then studied medicine. In California his gold mining didn't pay off so he practiced medicine in San Francisco and also wrote the first book published in English published west of the Rocky Mountains. It told the ungilded truth about life in California unlike others which painted unrealistic pictures of the Gold Rush.