Miriam Pawel in Conversation with T.J. Stiles

discussing The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation.

“A remarkable book–a generational biography of a political dynasty, ranging from the California Gold Rush to the presidency of Donald Trump. She recounts the pivotal governorship of Pat Brown and the even more significant career of his son Jerry with assured prose and a keen sense of historical context. This is the engrossing saga of complicated family at the center of American political life for the last sixty years.”–T.J. Stiles, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Custer’s Trials and The First Tycoon.

To reserve your seat, please purchase a copy of The Browns of California by speaking to a bookseller or via our website.

Even in the land of reinvention, the story is exceptional: Pat Brown, the beloved father who presided over California during an era of unmatched expansion; Jerry Brown, the cerebral son who became the youngest governor in modern times–and then returned three decades later as the oldest.

In The Browns of California, journalist and scholar Miriam Pawel weaves a narrative history that spans four generations, from August Schuckman, the Prussian immigrant who crossed the Plains in 1852 and settled on a northern California ranch, to his great-grandson Jerry Brown, who reclaimed the family homestead one hundred forty years later. Through the prism of their lives, we gain an essential understanding of California and an appreciation of its importance.

The magisterial story is enhanced by dozens of striking photos, many published for the first time. This book gives new insights to those steeped in California history, offers a corrective for those who confuse stereotypes and legend for fact, and opens new vistas for readers familiar with only the sketchiest outlines of a place habitually viewed from afar with a mix of envy and awe, disdain, and fascination.

Miriam Pawel is the author of The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and winner of the California Book Award, and The Union of Their Dreams—Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement. She is a Pulitzer-Prize winning editor and reporter who spent twenty-five years at Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Southern California.

T.J. Stiles is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.