Paradise Lost...

mount tamalpais in 1869

How did California lose the enthusiasm, positivism, and confidence it exuded in the fifties and sixties for the fiscal chaos, political randomness, and social divisiveness of today? Peter Schrag asks this and offers some illuminating answers in Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future (2004).

Book reviewer and historian John Connelly says Schrag provides “an annotated list of virtually every political disaster visited on California since ...1966.” Paradise Lost is a “compendium of political folly that retells California's riotous descent from atop the shining city-on-the-hill of the mid-1960s to the present debacle, wherein the state suffers from a multi-billion dollar deficit, a dysfunctional legislature, a disconnected and hate-filled electorate presided over by an Austrian ex-weight lifter whose rise to power illustrates the lubricating qualities of contemporary special-interest campaign funding.”

Read Connelly’s review; better yet, read Schrag’s book.


california's original bear flag