Book #12–My Beloved World

I saw Justice Sonya Sotomayor on the Daily Show and was impressed. She was talking about her autobiography, and I picked it up, expecting to learn a bit about a woman judge and justice. However My Beloved World isn’t what I expected. I learned a lot about her, and I ended up enjoying the book, but was disappointed there wasn’t more about her judicial work. However I expect she declined to write about that since she still sits as a judge.

The book was slow to start. It begins with her childhood, learning to manage her Type I diabetes by giving herself shots as an elementary school kid. From there it jumps back and forth from her childhood to her parents’ upbringing and shows how hard she worked, the struggles of being poor and Puerto Rican, and how good her family and friends were to her.

It took me a couple months to get through that. The book speeds up when she’s accepted to Princeton, and then when she goes to Yale law. We learn about her career as a prosecutor and then a civil lawyer representing Fendi and Ferrari among others. It’s an amazing story, though one that shows she’s very much an outlier and her record as a touch lawyer as well as her community work was what ended up getting her a nomination to be a Federal judge.

I enjoyed it eventually, though this is about Ms. Stomayor, not so much about the law.