A monumental biography of one of the most influential and revered Supreme Court justices of the last century.
The first comprehensive biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933), Supreme Court justice and cultural icon.
Ginsburg grew up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn; early in her career, she repeatedly suffered discrimination both as a woman and as a Jew. Nevertheless, she attended Cornell University and then law school at Harvard and Columbia (after she transferred), joined law school faculties, and was appointed to the federal bench at a time when those achievements were rare for women. Political historian De Hart (co-author: Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation, 1990, etc.) describes in absorbing detail the behind-the-scenes campaign to obtain her appointment to the Supreme Court engineered by her devoted husband, Martin Ginsburg, a renowned tax attorney, gourmet chef, and her biggest cheerleader. Since her arrival in 1993, the court has shifted steadily rightward, leaving her a lionized but increasingly isolated voice of principled dissent. Ginsburg's influence on American law can hardly be exaggerated, particularly in areas regarding minority and women's rights. The author clearly explains how, as an ACLU lawyer, Ginsburg plotted a successful incremental strategy to attack legal discrimination against women, which at the time was pervasive and took remarkably egregious forms. Once Ginsburg reaches the Supreme Court, De Hart excels in explaining the majority opinions, and later the dissents, in which she participated with remarkable clarity, illuminating the issues, the competing positions, and the significance of each in language easily grasped by readers with no legal training (for a nonlawyer, De Hart has a remarkable grasp of court jurisprudence). While the author's primary focus is Ginsburg's professional achievements, she also covers such topics as her battles with cancer, her love of opera, and her unlikely friendship with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia—though, as a notorious workaholic, it often appears she had little noteworthy personal life apart from the law.
A monumental biography of one of the most influential and revered Supreme Court justices of the last century.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4048-3
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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