My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

(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.”