Young Man in a Hurry is California Governor Gavin Newsom’s attempt to explain himself to a divided country that may soon find him vying for its presidency. He alternates between candor and wile in answering the book’s central question: who is Gavin Newsom? In these pages he constructs a striking hero’s journey, illuminating an insular world of inherited wealth, hereditary political power and ideological contradiction that few Americans will have been exposed to. But he also casts himself as a struggling underdog, a folksy type whose patrician image belies a life of perseverance and a unique set of emotional and psychological deprivations.

In producing this memoir, Newsom (“Newscum” to Donald Trump and, we are told, somewhat implausibly, his childhood bullies in Marin County) seems to have overcome his dyslexia, which prevents him from reading his speeches and caused him to underperform at school. He claims to have bombed the SAT (“three hours of dyslexic torture”) and fallen so far behind academically that he was “resigned to a stint at the local community college,” until Santa Clara University recruited him as a first baseman. That he admits to working with a ghostwriter is an example of the transparency he can exhibit throughout this work. But despite his attempts to control the more politically inconvenient – yet irrefutable – facts of his life, Newsom has done a surprising amount of fumigation.

Newsom is a fifth-generation Californian, a descendant of Irish and Scottish immigrants who arrived in the 19th century and never left. Until the governorship brought him to Sacramento, he had always lived in and around San Francisco. Through his father, William “Bill” Newsom III, he belongs to a powerful Bay Area milieu that traces its influence back to the Democratic machine politics of the 1930s. His mother, Tessa, was the daughter of a botanist who’d endured the Bataan death march during World War Two, struggled with alcoholism and died by suicide. His grandmother was also a bohemian who spent part of her life living as an actress in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

One doesn’t get the impression that Newsom shares the ideological vigor of his communist forebears. His reflections on life are far more concerned with people and personalities than ideas. When he occasionally invokes the rhetorical........

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