Snap Judgments

Bruce Kelley

If you want to know how the game feels from the inside—at least to the most brilliant, blissfully cocky politico of our time—this episodic memoir can’t be topped. Brown, who never writes anything down if he can help it, talked his tale over breakfasts with P.J. Corkery, the ex-Examiner columnist, and the book’s voice is pure Willie: joyfully Machiavellian and eager to tweak convention, patiently instructional, personally outrageous (wife, girlfriends, child by one girlfriend—all good), and full of “I gotcha” stories of his victories as the last imperial assembly speaker and, later, San Francisco’s mayor. Recounting his Democratic colleagues’ reaction to a particularly audacious legislative move he made, Brown writes, “They were thinking: Willie Brown is an awfully talented man.” No bull—just fact. But about the Our Times part of the subtitle, My Life and Our Times, expect nothing but frustration. Though Brown negotiated every law passed during disintegrating California’s build-more-prisons ’80s (including three strikes!) and presided over the city’s near civil war during the dot-com days, he’s not the type to ponder how either jurisdiction got so screwed up, or why he failed to stop the madness. (He barely mentions either episode.) Summing up his career, he says that he was but a nurse of the body politic who used his smarts to produce the least detrimental result for citizens in that moment. Too bad for anyone who wonders why the body politic kept getting sicker. B-