Discovering the Browns

Miriam Pawel is a Pulitzer-Prize winning editor and reporter who spent twenty-five years at Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She 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. In her latest book The Browns of California, 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 comes an essential understanding of California—an appreciation of the history and importance of the fifth largest economy in the world.