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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
