Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor's Autobiography

choi

Carla Main, A Book of Inspiration; Affirmative action gave Justice Sotomayor the opportunity to persevere. Wall Street Journal, Jan 17, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 43710583550462.html
(book review on Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World. Knopf, 2013)

Note:
(a) Sonia Sotomayor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor
(1954- ; father Juan Sotomayor; married to Kevin Edward Noonan 1976-1983; an assistant district attorney in Manhattan 1979-1983; solo practice from her Brooklyn apartment 1983-1986; US District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan) 1992-1998; US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit 1998-2009)

* Sonia (name)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_(name)
* currently single
(b) The review quotes Ms Sotomayor as saying, "I . . . read up on Che Guevara after I got home."

read up (on/about) sth:
"to spend time reading in order to find out information about something"
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ... ead-up-on-about-sth
(c) The review mentions "her occasional madcap adventures."

madcap (adj): "marked by capriciousness, recklessness, or foolishness"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/madcap

choi

Emily Bazelon, The Making of a Justice; Sonia SotoMayor recallsher early life and the road toward the court. New York Times, Jan 20, 2013
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/2 ... onia-sotomayor.html
(book review)

Excerpt in the window of print: Qualifying for financial aid to Princeton was easy, Sotomayor says. 'There were no assets to report.'

Quote:

"her grandmother blamed Sotomayor’s mother for her son’s [Sotomayor's father's] drinking, even as it turned him into a kind of monster. 'I saw my father receding from us, disappearing behind that twisted mask,' Sotomayor writes of watching him drink at parties. 'It was like being trapped in a horror film, complete with his lumbering Frankenstein walk as he made his exit and the looming certainty that there would be screaming when we got home.'  Sotomayor’s father died when she was 9, and she thinks to herself, with the sharp pragmatism of a child that age, 'Maybe it would be easier this way.'

Her mother was pathetic. "So Sotomayor became a library rat, though without any guidance. (She’d never heard of 'Alice in Wonderland' until she got to Princeton years later.) Finally, after months of lonely reading and evenings spent silent with her younger brother in front of the television, Sotomayor literally hurled herself at her mother’s door and screamed at her not to die too.

In high school: "An older student told her about something she’d never heard of — the Ivy League — and she followed him to Prince­ton. 'Qualifying for financial aid was the easiest part,' she writes. 'There were no assets to report.' * * * She received a C on her first midterm paper because she didn’t know how to write an essay.

"she sometimes misses social cues. At the law firm she later joined, a colleague called her 'one tough bitch.' Stung, she has made sure since then to hang on to a secretary who 'holds a mirror up when she notices me getting intimidating or too abrupt'

Note:
(a) The Spanish name Sotomayor is "Castilianized form of Soutomaior [names of two places in Galicia] so named from souto ‘grove’, ‘small wood’ + maior ‘larger’, ‘main.’"
Dictionary of American Family Names

Due to the Spanish origin, the "Sotomayor" has accent in the last syllable (yor)--pronounced differently from "mayor" in English.
(b) The reviewer says, "I thought of the mock juror who once told her, back in her law-student days, that he had voted against her because he didn’t like brassy Jewish women."

I do not know what "Jewish women" mean here. Justice Sotomayor is Catholic.

choi

David Gonzalez, With Her Old School Faces the End, a Justice Reminisces. New York Times, Jan 26, 2013 (title in print).
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.co ... tache-and-memories/

Quote:

(a) "Her recollection of Blessed Sacrament is unsentimental and unvarnished, reflecting the complicated feeling shared by many of that era’s graduates. She remembers how third grade left her in constant dread of running afoul of the black-robed Sisters of Charity who taught classes bursting with up to 50 students.

“'Discipline,' she wrote, 'was virtually an eighth sacrament.'

"On Friday, Justice Sotomayor recalled one episode from her years at the school: When she told a nun she did not want to eat a piece of rye bread, the nun invoked a familiar response. 'There are starving kids in India,' the nun said.

"Miss Sotomayor’s reply?

“'Well, I’ll mail it to them.'

"She was hauled up to the front of the cafeteria and slapped.

“'Everyone saw me get punished for the smart mouth that I had,' she said.

(b) "Her father died when she was in fourth grade, and her mother had to raise Sonia and her brother Juan Luis alone. Blessed Sacrament gave her mother Celina a two-for-one deal [for tuition]. Her mother worked hard, even as it drew the disapproval of the nuns who frowned on women working outside the home.

(c)"She shared those aspirations by the time she graduated from Blessed Sacrament, even if her eighth grade teacher Sister Mary Regina was somewhat puzzled.

"'The girl’s ambitions, odd as they seem, are to become an attorney and someday marry,' Sister Regina wrote in Sonia’s yearbook. 'Hopefully, she wishes to be successful in both fields. We predict a new life of challenges in Cardinal Spellman, where she will be attending high school, we hope she will be able to meet these new challenges.'


Note:
(a) Blessed Sacrament School
http://www.bssbronx.com/
(an inner city, Catholic Elementary/Middle school)

, which is part of
Blessed Sacrament Church (Bronx, New York)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blessed_Sacrament_Church_(Bronx,_New_York)
(completed in 1929; Blessed Sacrament parish school was founded around 1929)
(b) In print:
(i) The sentence--“Discipline," she wrote, "was virtually an eighth sacrament" in quotation (a)--was dropped.
(ii) The sentence--"She shared those aspirations by the time she graduated from Blessed Sacrament" at the outset of quotation (c)--becomes
"Miss Sotomayor had great aspirations by the time * * *
(c) Sonia Sotomayor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor
(Sotomayor passed the entrance tests for, then commuted to, Cardinal Spellman High School [Catholic] in the Bronx)