Historian Kevin Starr Was an Affectionate Connoisseur of California’s Contradictions

The Longtime State Librarian Told the Golden State's Story with a Novelist's Touch

California has had many chroniclers—some critics, some boosters, some cheerleaders, some dour polemicists. It’s only natural that a vast state defined by its extremes—political, geological, economic, and otherwise—would rarely be portrayed from the center.

But one of the paradoxes of the Golden State is that the greatest historian of California, someone who absorbed the writing of previous scholars and scribes, found a way to render this state of far left and extreme right, of ocean and desert, of triumphant and shameful, almost right down the middle. One of the many things …