A well-delineated portrait of an accomplished leader.
Los Angeles Times reporter, columnist, and editor Newton brings his deep knowledge of California politics to an engaging, sympathetic biography of the state’s 34th and 39th governor, Jerry Brown (b. 1938).
Drawing on abundant media coverage, archival sources, and interviews with key figures, including Brown himself, the author, who has written biographies of Earl Warren and Dwight Eisenhower, recounts the career of an unconventional, influential political figure. The son of politician Pat Brown, Jerry entered a Jesuit seminary in 1955 to study for the priesthood. He left after a few years, bristling under the “rules of obedience.” He enrolled at the University of California, where an activist counterculture swirled around him, inspiring him “to bring the liturgical Catholicism of his training” and his “searching, restless intellect” to addressing real-world problems. After graduating from Yale Law School, he returned to California to work in politics. First elected to the Los Angeles School Board, in 1970, he campaigned as a reformer for secretary of state, winning by a small margin. A run for governor followed, and in 1974, after a narrow victory, he ascended to the State House, promising “energy, youth, clean and constructive government.” Although supporters praised the “rambunctious, ambitious and unorthodox aspects” of his personality, his popularity waned. After a second term, Brown reflected, “I believe the people of California would like a respite from me. And in some ways, I would like a respite from them.” He lost a Senate race, failed three times to win nomination for president, and took a few years for introspection before staging a comeback, facing down 10 opponents to win election as mayor of the benighted city of Oakland. What he learned from being mayor, he admitted, shaped his return to the governorship in 2011. He was older and, he believed, wiser than he had been decades earlier. Climate change became his overriding issue, for which he earned accolades at home and abroad. Newton follows all of Brown’s ups and downs in a fluid, highly readable biography.
A well-delineated portrait of an accomplished leader.Pub Date: May 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-39246-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
