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| My Beloved World is an account of the early life of Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court Justice. |
We take turns picking books in our club. The members of the group have divergent reading interests and tolerances for long books. Our last book was The Goldfinch, which was about 400 pages longer than was absolutely necessary to tell the story, left us ready to read a non-literary book.
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| Gail also likes books that have been made into a movie! |
This months book, written Sonia Sotomayor - Supreme Court Justice, tells the story of her early life in New York. It wasn't a quick read, her story had many relatives, friends, teachers and events, but it flowed and in the end I felt that I had a perspective on who she is.
If I were to characterize her in few words I'd say that she's confident. The daughter of a machinist who had an unusual memory for numbers and an LPN, she grew up in housing projects in New York City. Widowed when Sonia was 8-9 her mother worked long hours and relied on her extended family in New York City to help raise Sonia and her brother. Her mother took advantage of the resources available to her - sending Sonia and her brother to catholic schools, journeying across town to take her to a modern clinic for children with Type I diabetes- which gave Sonia a healthy physical and intellectual start on life.
Sonia modeled her ambitions to be a lawyer and a judge after watching many episodes of Perry Mason. My Dad used to watch Perry Mason, and I spent many a summer watching re-runs of the show, although it never left me determined to be the one behind the bench making decisions.
A smart girl who loved the feeling of good grades she won a scholarship to Princeton University, graduated Phi Beta Kappa and went onto Yale Law. From there she went on to work in the New York District Attorney's office, eventually moving to private practice and then onto a judgeship.
I was impressed with her courage. In high school when a Nun accuses her of cheating on a test she challenges the Nun asking, who in the class did better than I did that I could have copied from? When admitted to Princeton on a scholarship she turned around and nearly took the University to court because they weren't adhering to their affirmative action plan. When she encountered someone on a recruiting dinner at law school who insinuated minorities were admitted to Yale because of their race and not their merit she protested and nearly had the law firm barred from recruiting from Yale. Clearly the law was a good career choice for her! To me her actions seem bold and I have to admire her for that.
Moving on from my book club read, I also fit in some personal reading.
I missed a couple of episodes of Season 2 and went looking for the episodes on the internet. While I was reading a review of the show, hoping to fill in some of the story that I missed, I found a recommendation for a spy thriller that was supposed to be based on Soviet spys - Dark Star.
Dark Star, like My Beloved World, was a not a quick read. Set in the late 1930s in Paris, Germany and Poland, the thriller has many characters with foreign names and aliases and references to history, events and geography that I wasn't familiar with.
Initially the book was easy to put down, but in the end I spent all day Saturday finishing it - is there anything more delightful than a book that begs you to finish reading it?
The book connected me with my in-laws. There were many references to the port in Odessa, now a part of Turkey. My family has been in this country since before the Revolutionary War, but my husband's family, came to the United States through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. The records from Ellis Island list the port of Odessa as their origin.
When my mother-in-law moved out of the family home two large dictionaries came to our home. Before the days when one clicked on a word in their Kindle to see the definition, we used those dictionaries. One still resides on a stand in our living room. After I encountered the word pogrom 6 or 7 times I went and looked it up on that dictionary.
Another passage that mentioned the "night of shattered glass" reminded of that my mother-in-law experienced the event as a student in Germany. She was there during the Kristallnacht. She did not perceive it as a sinister event. It could be that in her university community exactly what happened wasn't well known. She grew up in New York City, Jews were a part of life there, actions against them wouldn't have been something she'd have embraced. When she returned to New York at the end of the semester telling her family of the excitement and optimism of German youth over developments in the country, her family was shocked at how she viewed the event. She was soon straightened out as to sinister implications of what had happened during her study abroad.
I enjoyed watching The Americans on television, it's set decades later in the 1970s, but it pales against the book Dark Star. I have another book by the author coming, -.01 cent used from Amazon!- and hope to find out more about the pre WWII period in history by reading his historical thrillers. There's still a lot of summer left and what's summer without some good reads?
