Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story is, one hopes, only one woman's story and not the story of the Black Panther Party as a whole. In this gossipy, self-obsessed, and superficial memoir, Brown appears to be not a serious leader of a vital and important activist group of the 1960s and 1970s, but a Party groupie with little interest in or understanding of the concepts and goals which inspired the Panthers, however naive and romantic most of those concepts and goals might have been. If Brown is truly the woman she seems to be, it does not say much for the Panthers as a group, considering that she did, in fact, become chairman of the group in the absence of her mentor and leader, Huey Newton. Knowing she would remain loyal to him, Newton likely picked Brown in order to prevent a takeover by one of his rivals.
The book is first an autobiography, and second an account, however incomplete and sensationalistic, of the rise and fall of the Party through its ever-turbulent existence. The rare spurts of political philosophy in the book feel shoehorned in, as if Brown felt that she could not simply present a kiss-and-tell book, but was obliged to at least mention the political aspects of her life in the Panthers. She freely admits to having no interest in or knowledge of politics before her sudden introduction to the Panthers, and it seems that her political interest after that introduction was minimal, despite her rise to power in the group. She seems far more interested in the romantic aspects of her associations with the prominent leaders in the Party.
Brown also recounts numerous confrontations between the Panthers and the police and FBI, but even in those cases she maintains a romantic perspective, viewing through rose-colored glasses whatever the Panthers do and never seeming to consider that the members of the group might not have been quite as idealistic as she believes.
To be as fair as possible, the Black...