My Beloved World – January 7, 2014 Author: Visit Amazon's Sonia Sotomayor Page | Language: English | ISBN:
034580483X | Format: EPUB
My Beloved World – January 7, 2014 Description
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2013: Happily, it is becoming a familiar story: The young, smart, and very hardworking son or daughter of immigrants rises to the top of American professional life. But already knowing the arc of Sonia Sotomayor’s biography doesn’t adequately prepare you for the sound of her voice in this winning memoir that ends, interestingly, before the Yale Law School grad was sworn in as the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. Hers is a voice that lands squarely between self-deprecating and proud, grateful and defiant; a voice lilted with bits of Puerto Rican poetry; a voice full of anger, sadness, ambition, and love. My Beloved World is one resonant, glorious tale of struggle and triumph. --Sara Nelson
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* When Sotomayor joined the U.S. Supreme Court in 2009, she made history as the first Hispanic on the high court. She’d also achieved the highest dream of a Puerto Rican girl growing up in a Bronx housing project longing to someday become a judge. In this amazingly candid memoir, Sotomayor recalls a tumultuous childhood: alcoholic father, emotionally distant mother, aggravating little brother, and a host of aunts, uncles, and cousins, all overseen by her loving, domineering paternal grandmother. When she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes at eight years of age, she knew she had to learn to give herself the insulin shots. That determination saw her through Catholic high school, Princeton, and Yale Law School, at each step struggling to reconcile the poverty of her childhood with the privileges she was beginning to enjoy. No rabble-rouser, she nonetheless was active in student groups supporting minorities. At Yale, she learned how to think about jurisprudence, but readers looking for clues to her judicial thinking will be disappointed as she deliberately demurs. She recounts complicated feelings toward her parents and her failed marriage as she advanced to the DA’s office, private practice, the district court, and, triumphantly, the Supreme Court. Sotomayor offers an intimate and honest look at her extraordinary life and the support and blessings that propelled her forward. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A media blitz will attend the release of this already newsworthy memoir by the Supreme Court’s first Hispanic justice. --Vanessa Bush
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Series: Vintage
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (January 7, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 034580483X
- ISBN-13: 978-0345804839
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Memoirs today come out of a black hole, many of them tainted by allusions to fact later revealed to be the heady stuff of fiction. It has happened so often the genre, it seems, doesn't know what it wants to be. So it is refreshing right out of the box to run into the preface of Justice Sotomayor, who lays down her rules for writing...rules of engagement, as it were. She takes as firm a stand as we are likely to read against blended characters, and a reader gets the impression there isn't going to be a recall of this book, a retraction, let alone a major scandal involving facts that turn out to be chimera. Considering the disasters we've come to expect from memoir, it's a great start.
I winced when the Justice gave herself an insulin injection on 60 Minutes; the incident repeats itself in the opening chapter, one that it reads more like a Dennis Lehane sequence, and the only thing keeping it from continuing on in this manner are the interjections, the lessons of a lived life, that every so often bubble up and infuse the text with didactic mannerisms. But even with them, the text flows easily, readers are engulfed in the lustrous prose because the language is steeped in verisimilitude with its seances, Abuelita and bisabuela, the neuropathy of a father bathed in alcoholism - the characters all alive, vivid, and brilliantly real. At some moments, you could be in the magical world of Marquez, as in: "vines snaked under iron fences and up balustrades. Chickens scrabbled under hibiscus bushes and bright yellow canario flowers. I watched the afternoon rains pour down like a curtain...". In other places, the regret of Joan Didion: "ballet class was a brief torture.
I did not quite know what to expect regarding this memoir by Justice Sotomayor of her pre-judicial life. As a student of the Court for 40 years or so, a lawyer for 35 years, and a trained political scientist, I have found judicial biographies and the few judicial memoirs highly insightful into the character and actions of particular Justices. Justice Sotomayor is certainly the least known of the current Court, at least to me, and I was pleasantly surprised how absolutely candid her book is. It tells one a great deal about her, her background, and her character. The only other candid and insightful memoir that compares with this one is Justice Thomas' "My Grandfather's Son," distinctive for its remarkable honesty and perspective on his thinking and the factors that shaped it. A number of her topics stand out:
First, she affords the reader a remarkable perspective on affirmative action, which she readily admits touched upon her own life in terms of Princeton, Yale Law, and her selection as a U.S. District Judge. Her attitude is much more supportive of the concept than Thomas was in his sometimes angry discussion of the issue in his book. Sotomayor places emphasis upon affirmative action as providing an opportunity to work very hard, unbelievably hard, and to demonstrate what your true capabilities are. She discusses this concept several times at different stages of her book, and I am very appreciative for helping to develop my thinking on this important issue.
Second, I found her story most fascinating because it is, in microcosm, the story of Puerto Rican challenges in Hispanic New York. I knew very little about this culture before reading the book.
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