My Beloved World

My Beloved World

Sonia Sotomayor

Language: English

Pages: 432

ISBN: 034580483X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor has become an instant American icon. Now, with a candor and intimacy never undertaken by a sitting Justice, she recounts her life from a Bronx housing project to the federal bench, a journey that offers an inspiring testament to her own extraordinary determination and the power of believing in oneself.

Here is the story of a precarious childhood, with an alcoholic father (who would die when she was nine) and a devoted but overburdened mother, and of the refuge a little girl took from the turmoil at home with her passionately spirited paternal grandmother. But it was when she was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes that the precocious Sonia recognized she must ultimately depend on herself.  She would learn to give herself the insulin shots she needed to survive and soon imagined a path to a different life. With only television characters for her professional role models, and little understanding of what was involved, she determined to become a lawyer, a dream that would sustain her on an unlikely course, from valedictorian of her high school class to the highest honors at Princeton, Yale Law School, the New York County District Attorney’s office, private practice, and appointment to the Federal District Court before the age of forty. Along the way we see how she was shaped by her invaluable mentors, a failed marriage, and the modern version of extended family she has created from cherished friends and their children. Through her still-astonished eyes, America’s infinite possibilities are envisioned anew in this warm and honest book, destined to become a classic of self-invention and self-discovery.

Murder on the Home Front

Bullies: A Friendship

Anger Is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

Giving Up the Ghost: A Story About Friendship, 80s Rock, a Lost Scrap of Paper, and What It Means to Be Haunted

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Had saved her from that fate. Aurora was busy with the handkerchiefs, working long hours and traveling to collect piecework from other women who sewed. Celina still made her two dozen handkerchiefs every week. She cleaned the house on Saturdays and did small things to make it nice, picking flowers to put beside the photographs in frames. They had electricity, though the toilet was still outside. Aurora’s husband, Emmanuel, was an old man and crazy in his own way. He was a blacksmith, but he.

Glimpse of trust funds; tax write-offs and loopholes; summer jobs at Daddy’s firm that paid the equivalent of a year’s tuition; incomes in the millions, disbursed a half million here, a few hundred thousand for that poor guy there. Between her own salary from Prospect Hospital and her survivors’ benefits, which would end very soon, my mother’s income was never more than five thousand dollars a year. Nothing could have clarified as starkly where I stood in relation to some of the people among whom.

Say it was important to share the luck with others. Still, the sense of arbitrariness—unfathomable and irreducibly unsettling—would linger so that even in the best of times you could never be entirely sure that you were home safe. It was because of this uneasy climate that so much of the work of Acción Puertorriqueña and other such groups focused on freshman admissions. In those early days of affirmative action—again, the practice was so new to Ivy League admissions that the first Latino.

Prestigious over the years since I left law school and the most direct stepping-stone to higher levels of legal practice. Many minority students and others who struggle under financial pressure sacrifice the long-term benefits of clerking for better pay in the near term. I advise them to resist that temptation and aim for the necessary grades, journal experience, and mentoring relationships with professors that can open the door to a clerkship. Part of me still regrets not having taken José’s.

Will you?” It was tough love, challenging my ingrained relentlessly negative physical self-image: “Who cares what your mom told you twenty years ago? What matters is how you look this Saturday night. Stop censoring yourself. You look great.” No, I don’t. Maybe not quite as bad as I did then, but great I don’t look. Standing beside Nancy in front of the dressing room mirror, I would say to myself: She has such great style. This would really look good on her. I wish I had my own sense of style.

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