Howard Blum — American Author

Howard Blum is an American author and journalist. Formerly a reporter for the The Village Voice and The New York Times, Blum is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the author of several non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller and Edgar Award winnerAmerican Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century... (wikipedia)

Gold has an almost atavistic lure. People feel it has a panacea effect.
When hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world went to the Yukon to look for gold, the original prospectors had already claimed most of it.