-Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World preface
After seeing a TV interview of Sonia Sotomayor and having one member of our book club suggest we should read her recently published memoir, I selected it as our March book. I am so glad I read it! Justice Sotomayor is a new hero of mine!
I especially loved the first 200 pages or so of the book, the part where she describes her family, her early years and her education. I was so impressed that a young person with a difficult life and many strikes against her could rise to higher and higher levels of success, up to her selection as the first U.S. Supreme Court Justice of Hispanic heritage.
As quite a fan of crime and courtroom television dramas, I found her early career as an attorney interesting, as well, though not as compelling as the part I mentioned previously. Sotomayor was very perceptive and intuitive in her work and apparently she attributes much of her talent in this area to the way she grew up in a far-from-ideal home.
It was striking to me that with all her assertiveness and independence, she never aspired to be a "rabble rouser." At Yale, Sotomayor was a member of Accion Puertorriquena, an activist group who addressed minority problems on campus but also became involved with national issues. She says, "Not that I didn't care passionately about the group's causes; rather, I had my doubts that linking arms, chanting slogans, hanging effigies, and shouting at passersby were always the most effective tactics. I could see that troubling the waters was occasionally necessary to bring attention to the urgency of some problem....Quiet pragmatism, of course, lacks the romance of vocal militancy. But I felt myself more a mediator than a crusader. My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge." Personally, I wish we had more people in positions of authority who had those strengths!
I appreciated Justice Sotomayor's writing style also. It was clear, personal, descriptive and at times, poetic, as in this description of her first visit to Puerto Rico as an adult: "In the rain forest at El Yunque, waterfalls trick the eye, holding movement suspended in lacy veils. Wet stone gleams, fog tumbles from peaks to valleys, mists filter the forest in pale layers receding into mystery. On the beach at Luquillo, when the sun appears under clouds massed offshore and catches the coconut palms at a low angle, the leafy crowns explode like fireworks of silver light." I thought she added just enough humor in her story, as well.
I liked putting my smallish Spanish vocabulary to work through the book and when I got stuck, there were usually context clues, or as a last resort, the glossary in the back of the book.
It was my good luck that I saw another interview of Justice Sotomayor on "Oprah's Next Chapter," which aired on March 24, after reading the book. She was very candid and down-to-earth. She seemed rather in awe of sitting with Oprah, and I believe the feeling was mutual!
Tomorrow the book club meets to discuss the book. Hopefully we will have enough to talk about since I could never find questions on the Internet as I usually do. I hope others liked My Beloved World as much as I did. I have rated it a 5. I will return to finish after the meeting.
*****
The Page Turners met this morning, a smaller-than-normal group due to Easter plans for the weekend, travel and so forth. Refreshments included flan and plantains, relating to the author's heritage. Everyone liked My Beloved World; no one rated it lower than 4. The average was 4.2. We had a wonderful discussion using some generic biography questions I found online after my extensive search had not located book-specific ones. We all agreed that Sonia Sotomayor is an amazing woman and someone we would like to know!
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