January Royal Oak Book Club

Event: Royal Oak Book Club

Date: January 10, 2016

Time: 4:00 - 6:00 PM

Location: Vinotecca, 417 South Main Street, Royal Oak, MI 48067

Cost: Everyone pays for themselves

Parking: Free on Sunday

Point of contact: Michele Marion michele.marion@swe.org

Other info:

Discussing The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet

By Nina Teicholz

Book Review of My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor

Book Review by Irina Sullivan

My Beloved World by the currently serving Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor is a genuine and insightful account of the personal and professional challenges she faced leading up to her career as a judge. We learn a lot about this uniquely strong, fiercely independent, and undeniably high achieving woman who from a humble Bronx upbringing by a widowed mother went on to become the first Latina Supreme Court Justice in U.S. history.

Despite Sotomayor’s many achievements, however, the tone of the book is one of honest sharing, self-reflection, and above all encouragement and inspiration to the reader. Sotomayor offers a great insight of her own thoughts from early childhood on, such as her initial decision to succeed in academics and her drive following every successive accomplishment to proceed to the next level of learning, development, and intellectual growth. In short, she never stops honing her skills, adding tools to her toolbox, and working to expand her worldview.

This book, however, is not a how-to manual to becoming a Supreme Court Justice. For one, the book ends twenty years ago when Sotomayor first became a judge and therefore does not detail the critical years of her journey to the Supreme Court nomination. Nevertheless, as Sotomayor remarks in the preface, the question posed to her most often is how not to give up on such a seemingly far­fetched goal of achieving one of the most powerful posts in the nation if not the entire world. To that the Justice admits that such a goal did not occur to her except “as the remotest of fantasies” and instead offers that “you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true” and that “the proper measure of success is not how much you’ve closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you’ve done today.”

My Beloved World is a unique contribution to the writings by members of the Supreme Court and that’s a good thing ­ the better we understand the genuine motivations of the people behind the High Court decisions the less we feel at the mercy of the law and instead take responsibility for bringing about a more just world.