. . . and His Lovely Wife

May 14, 2007
S
chultz (Life Happens
) gives a frank and adoring account of standing by her man, Sherrod Brown, in his run for U.S. Senate from Ohio. Ashtabula-bred Schultz and Democratic Congressman Brown, both middle-aged, longtime divorced single parents, married in 2004, and by the middle of the next year had decided he would quit his congressional seat and oppose two-term Republican Sen. Mike DeWine. While a supportive and loving wife, Schultz is also a feminist, devoted to her work as a journalist (she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005); she reluctantly gave in to the pressure to take a sabbatical from her Cleveland Plain Dealer
column during the course of the campaign. However, she became a valuable tool to her husband's success, from forcing his handlers to give the exhausted candidate time to recoup to trotting out her working-class family's hard-luck story when convenient. There are many funny moments (Brown was criticized for his unruly curls and his “cheap suits”), and DeWine's negative ads (led by Republican strategist Karl Rove) prompted Brown's team, in Hillary Clinton's words, to “deck him” with an ad of its own. (Schultz's own newspaper didn't endorse Brown.) Eventually, he won, and Schultz could happily return to her column. Her diary is upbeat, sometimes overly but affably composed.

June 15, 2007
Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at the "Cleveland Plain Dealer", is married to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio. In early 2006, she took a leave of absence from the newspaper both to work on her husband's campaign and to avoid any criticism for partisan writing. Here, she recounts the ups and downs of his eventually successful campaign, particularly in the face of new styles of journalism, mounting campaign costs, and the stress of running for office (Brown was long considered the underdog). She also discusses the campaign's effect on their personal lives, including the touching story of her father's impassioned support of her husband and the pain of his death early in the campaign. Finally, she assesses the complexity of appealing to a wide range of potential voters without sacrificing their own core beliefs, particularly in traditionally Republican sections of the state. While not meant as an academic study of modern political campaigning, the book does an excellent job of articulating the ordeal. Strongly recommended for public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 2/1/07.]Joel W. Tscherne, formerly with Cleveland P.L.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2007
In 2005, when her husband, Congressman Sherrod Brown, announced his intention to run for the U.S. Senate, Schultz, columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, suddenly went from Pulitzer Prizewinningjournalist and commentator torelative obscurityasapoliticians wife. When Brown announced his campaignand attempt to be the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Ohio in 14 yearsshe was momentarily at a loss about what it would mean for her as she listened to criticismabout her decision tokeep her job and her name. Finally, on leave from her job as columnist, she settled into observing the campaign from the perspective of a political wife and writing about the experience of a relatively new marriage weathering a campaign. Schultz recounts thestresses and tensions ofthe campaign: a fund-raiser scheduled on their second anniversary, political operatives rifling through the familys garbage, coping with negative press and her husbands reactions, concerns that her presence would be viewed as her papers endorsement of Browns candidacy. A revealing and amusing look at campaigns from a wifes perspective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)