Veteran Times journalist Jim Newton's graceful 'Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown' doubles as a history of postwar California.
For decades, Californians watched, analyzed, criticized and voted for Edmund G. Brown Jr. And for all that, he remains one of the most captivating, bewildering, inspiring and infuriating figures in the state’s history. He may also be the most quintessentially Californian, embodying an admixture of contemplation, activism and self-contradiction at the heart of a nation-state with a population bigger than Canada’s.
Let’s start at the beginning, for it helps us understand where Brown and California end up. Drawn to the confines of the seminary, Brown intended to become a Jesuit priest — trying, as he put it, “to overcome the self-indulgent, weak part of human nature.” This would turn out to be a lifelong goal. He picked grapes and picked over the Bible, thinking he had picked the right way to traverse the world: through “abnegation and continuous mortification.
He and his father, Gov. Pat Brown, had an affectionate but uneasy relationship that Newton sketches with skill, and in his comparisons between father and son he sets the younger Brown in sharp relief: “His son would ... never, once he reached power, be accused of glad-handing — dealmaking, yes, but out of pragmatism, not out of uncertainty.”
Brown, left, sits next to UFW leader Cesar Chavez at the graveside service for slain farmworker Rufino Contreras.But the reader comes back to the 34th and 39th governor of California, and to the result of Newton’s deep examination of a man whose 16 years as governor were the longest reign in the state:
When Brown returned to the governor’s chair in 2011 after stints as mayor of Oakland and state attorney general, he was in a different period in his life — and California was in a different place too. Brown had gone from wise guy to wise man, from skinflint to a bit of a spendthrift; the bullet train caught his eye and his imagination, though it also courted controversy. “It’s not always easy,” Newton concludes, “to be a man of tomorrow.
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