Miriam Pawel, a Pulitzer-winning journalist who’s written for Newsday, Los Angeles Times andThe New York Times, and wrote two books about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, has published a new book that maintains her career trajectory of illuminating the California story.
The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nationchronicles the lives of the family that produced two of the state’s most influential political leaders.
“The book is a narrative history of California told through the prism of four generations of the extended Brown family, beginning with Jerry’s great-grandfather, who arrived in Northern California in 1852, just two years after statehood,” Pawel writes by email.
Pat Brown served as California’s attorney general (1950-58) and governor (1959-67), and left big legacies, including the massive water allocations of the State Water Project, and the Master Plan for Higher Education which defined the roles of the state’s three college systems. Jerry Brown served as California’s Secretary of State (1971-75), as governor (1974-82; 2011-18) and attorney general (2007-11), and made deep impacts on the state’s environmental policies, the courts and criminal justice.
“It’s difficult to find a facet of life in California that doesn’t bear their imprint in some way,” Pawel says.
The book aims to fill in the context and backstory.
“This is a family that is so connected to this place, committed to the idea of California exceptionalism, and instrumental in many ways in furthering those ideas – it’s uniquely a California story.”
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