(Knopf, $28)
Sonia Sotomayor is not a typical Supreme Court justice, said Jason Farago in NPR.org. The court’s first Latina member peppers lawyers with questions from the bench, dances the salsa at public events, and generally refuses to adopt “a pose of Olympian detachment.” That makes her new memoir “classic Sotomayor: intelligent, gregarious, and at times disarmingly personal.” In this chronicle of her rise from poverty to a 1992 appointment to the federal bench, the 58-year-old South Bronx, N.Y., native occasionally doles out facile advice. But she also provides valuable perspective on “a critical moment in American history—when the doors of the country’s elite institutions finally started to crack open” to the disadvantaged.
Sotomayor first had to overcome a childhood “fraught with difficulties,” said Jay Wexler in The Boston Globe. Born to Puerto Rican immigrants with little money, young Sonia was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 8 and had to learn how to inject herself with insulin: Her mother worked, and her father, an alcoholic who would die a year later, had shaky hands. Sotomayor treats such early challenges as “givens, even gifts.” Since she was expected to die young, she writes, “I couldn’t afford to waste time.” Admission to Princeton eventually plunged her into a new world, and she credits many mentors, from her professors to her grandma, with helping her adjust.
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My Beloved World at times brings to mind another justice’s recent memoir, said Dahlia Lithwick in The Washington Post. In 2007’s My Grandfather’s Son, Clarence Thomas decried affirmative action, saying its shadow cheapened his achievements. Sotomayor, by contrast, defends the policy’s ability to create role models, as it did for her. Though she says little else about judicial philosophy, her touchstone values come across clearly. President Obama offended some when he cited Sotomayor’s capacity for empathy as a reason he nominated her to the high court, but her book is “a powerful brief in defense of empathy, her long-awaited closing argument in the trial of Mind v. Heart.”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”