Review by New York Times Review
AFTER THE UNITED STATES pulled OUt of the Paris climate accords, California's governor, Jerry Brown, became the nation's unofficial climate change ambassador. In this age of Trump, his leadership won him accolades. But not long ago, Brown's ideas about sustainability were deemed far-out and flaky. In his first term as governor in the 1970s, his backing of new technologies to solve human and environmental problems led one journalistto label him "Governor Moonbeam." With over 40 years in California politics, his once visionary environmentalism has now gone mainstream. Miriam Pawel's fascinating book "The Browns of California" charts four generations of the Brown family, focusing on the political careers of Edmund (Pat) Brown - the two-term California governor from 1959 to 1967 - and his son, Edmund (Jerry) Brown Jr., governor from 1975 to 1983, and again from 2011 to the present. The Browns' collective 24-year political domination of California has spanned an astonishing 60 years. Pawel, the author of "The Crusades of Cesar Chavez," bills her family saga as a "lens through which to tell a unique history of the 31st state," but it does much more. Her engaging narrative of the politics, ideas and policies of the two Edmund Browns illuminates the sea change in the nation's politics in the last half of the 20 th century. Pat Brown was an old-style liberal when he was catapulted into office in 1958 during the golden age of the American Century. He believed that government was responsible for providing a strong social safety net, spent millions of dollars to expand the state's system of higher education and backed a state anti-discrimination law. He also supported the war in Vietnam. When California was rocked by antiwar protests, inner-city turmoil and a backlash against the state's fair housing law, Brown lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan in 1966. Jerry Brown was steeped in his father's political world, but like many of his generation he was repelled by what he saw as the "confusion and hypocrisy of government." Coming of age in the 1960s, he opposed the Vietnam War, supported Cesar Chavez's farmworker movement and campaigned for the antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. He was a nonconformist critical of "the oligarchy, the power establishmentelite." Even after he joined it, winning his race for governor in 1974, he canceled the inaugural ball, drove a Plymouth to work, slept on a mattress on the floor of his austere apartment and made E. E Schumacher's 1973 countercultural manifesto "Small Is Beautiful" required staff reading. Brown's countercultural ethos shared some common ground with traditional conservatives' hostility to the governing class. During his first term as governor, he exhorted students at Santa Clara University "to depend on your own energy and your own creative potential." He slashed the budget of the state's sprawling university system: Faculty members, he said, should accept lower salaries because their work brought them "psychic income." Berkeley's high-paid president should look to Gandhi's example: "He didn't make any money and he was pretty successful." But Brown's calls for reining in state spending took a consequential turn during his re-election campaign in 1978. He decided to accept Howard Jarvis's Proposition 13, a referendum initiative to slash property taxes. Declaring himself a "bornagain tax cutter," he rode the tax revolt wave to a landslide win for a second term. In the wake of the referendum's passage, however, state budgets were eviscerated. California educational spending per pupil dropped from near the top of all states' to near bottom. Jerry Brown's liberalism has centered on the environment (a problem he deemed more pressing than concerns about "whether or not you have the capacity to buy a second car"), women's equality and minority rights. But his policies have hurt poor- and working-class Americans left behind by fraying social safety nets, ailing cities and failing schools; they are ever more likely to land in the state's exploding prison system. Pawel portrays Brown as a thoughtful visionary whose faith in the emancipatory potential of the free market helped usher in the nation's second Gilded Age. Neoliberal economic policies, often associated with conservative Republicans, appealed to iconoclastic Democrats like Brown, who were hostile to bureaucracy and skeptical of establishment institutions. But Jerry Brown's counterculturally-inflected distrust of government has helped make liberal California the poverty capital of America.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The Brown ""dynasty"" didn't dominate California's politics like the Kennedy family did in Massachusetts. But the family has played and continues to play significant roles in local and national politics. Pawel (The Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 2014) expertly mines family archives, oral histories, and interviews with contemporary sources to fully and for the first time chronicle the origins and accomplishments of this remarkable clan. The ""founder,"" August Schuckman, came to California in 1852, and he found success selling goods to miners rather than digging for gold. His grandson, Edmund ""Pat"" Brown, became governor in 1959. Pawel describes him as a natural politician whose enthusiasm, exuberance, and sociability meshed well with the can-do spirit of the rapidly expanding state. His son, Jerry, initially seemed cut from different cloth. He disdained the hurly-burly of political campaigns and entered a Jesuit seminary. But Jerry, with his eager, searching mind, found the seminary dogmatic and spirit crushing, and he made his way to politics after all. Elected governor in 1975, his unorthodox style and interests earned him the label ""Governor Moonbeam."" Pawel vividly and insightfully chronicles Jerry's two terms as governor, his years in the political wilderness, his rebirth as a progressive mayor of Oakland, and his return to the governorship. This fine and engaging political saga tracks both the Brown family and the growth of the state they have served.--Jay Freeman Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Pawel (The Crusades of Cesar Chavez) continues to explore the California political landscape with this well-written and deeply researched dual biography of the late Pat Brown, the state's governor from 1959 to 1967, and his son Jerry Brown, who was governor from 1975 to 1983 and reelected in 2011. The senior Brown is fairly described as a traditional politician whose career had a traditional trajectory, while son Jerry-called "Governor Moonbeam" by a Chicago newspaper columnist-is anything but: in addition to a peripatetic political career that included three runs at the Democratic presidential nomination, a term as California's attorney general, and time as the mayor of Oakland, Calif., Jerry's personal history involved formative years as a novice in a Jesuit seminary and a serious investigation of Buddhism. Pawel returns again and again to the connection between Pat and Jerry, who were respectful and tender toward one another despite their differences. She also underscores the powerful influence of women-specifically Bernice Brown, Pat's wife of 66 years and Jerry's mother; Anne Gust Brown, whom Jerry married late in life; and Jerry's sister Kathleen, who made her own run at California's governorship in 1994-in the two men's lives. The backdrop for all of this is the rich history of California, illuminated with small historical details that are a testament to Pawel's research. In her capable hands, readers will find the Browns and California captivating subjects. Agent: Gloria Loomis, Watkins Loomis. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With previous works under her belt about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Pawel (The Crusades of Cesar Chavez) now turns her attention to California's prominent Brown family. While many other family members are discussed, the book focuses heavily on the father-son duo who would both become the state's governor-Pat and Jerry Brown. Starting from when the different branches of the Irish-German Catholic clan immigrated to the United States-and, subsequently, California-this book follows the rise and fall (and second rise, with Jerry) of the Browns' political fortunes. While clearly sympathetic to the Browns, Pawel is not an apologist for some of their less-popular actions or less-effective policies. She notes both the good and the bad, which makes for a refreshing read. VERDICT Well researched, with an extensive bibliography of primary sources, this work will appeal to both scholarly and armchair historians, as well as readers with an interest in contemporary politics, California history, modern history, family history, and biography.-Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A vivid portrait of California's land and people emerges from a sympathetic family biography.Drawing on interviews, oral histories, and extensive archival sources, journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Pawel (The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, 2014, etc.) examines California's colorful, dramatic, and turbulent history through her biography of the ambitious and influential Browns, a family indelibly involved in the state's fortunes since 1951, when Edmund G. "Pat" Brown (1905-1996) was sworn in as California's attorney general. A few years later, as he considered running for governor, he extolled his great state: "To think that I will have some part, good or bad, in shaping its destiny is sobering." A gregarious politician whose style of campaigning, his wife said, was "low comedy," in 1959 Brown succeeded in becoming California's 32nd governor, overseeing a period of exuberant economic and population expansion. His son, Jerry, however, seemed uninterested in following in his father's footsteps; instead, he entered a Jesuit seminary to study for the priesthood, which he saw as "a path to public serviceand an alternative to the commercial politics of his father's world." Yet after a few years, bristling against the mandate of "obedience to dogma" that quashed "his inquiring mind and spirit," he renounced his calling. Politics inevitably drew him: After law school, he won a seat on the Los Angeles school board; a year and a half later, he won election as secretary of state. In 1975 he became the 34thand youngestgovernor of California. Although Pawel chronicles the political career of Pat Brown's daughter Kathleen, who served as California State Treasurer, Jerry takes center stage for much of the book, as the author recounts his "refreshing" candor and unconventional leadership during his first two terms as governor, earning him the epithet of "Governor Moonbeam"; his years of soul-searching and recalibration after he was defeated in tries for the presidency; his return as defiant and spirited mayor of Oakland and, in 2010, to statewide power as California's 39thand oldestgovernor.A well-informed history of a powerful dynasty. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
